The mistake of shipping weed to India along with a consignment of wheat from the USA during the 1950s inadvertently gifted India a beautiful species of butterfly.
The simple but elegantly attractive Bath White butterfly, which derives its name from the English town of Bath where it was first recorded in Britain, is now found in the trans-Himalayan range.
Uttarakhand-based lepidopterist Peter Smetacek, who is considered an authority on Indian butterflies and moths, has presented the case of migration of this species in his book 'Butterflies on the Roof of the World'.
"Once, I was standing on the lawn talking with a visitor when a female butterfly laid its eggs on a weed a few metres away. This was too good an opportunity to miss, so I gathered the plant and eventually bred the caterpillars that emerged," Smetacek writes in the book published by Aleph.
As he tried to unravel the mystery behind the relationship of the butterfly larva and the plant on which it fed, he found that the plant was Virginia Peppergrass or Lepidium virginicum. The butterfly, therefore, came to be known as Bath White.
"This weed had been brought to India by mistake as part of wheat shipped from the United States during the 1950s and had spread rapidly through the country," says the naturalist, who has already described a dozen species of butterflies and moths new to science.
