Critically Endangered
Kaplan's Thestor
Thestor kaplani
Kaplan's Thestor is a gossamer-winged butterfly in the family Lycaenidae (order Lepidoptera) — Thestor kaplani, recorded as Critically Endangered.
The gossamer-winged butterfly
The wingspan is 26–28 mm for males and 27–29 mm for females.
Range and habitat
It is endemic to South Africa, where it is only known from fynbos on the slopes of the Riviersonderend Mountains above Greyton in the Western Cape.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The adult is what most collections hold. The larva — the feeding stage — is often undescribed for the rarest names.
Life history follows the order: complete metamorphosis in moths and beetles, nymphs in grasshoppers and bugs. This page does not invent a host plant that no source named.
In crisis
Named moths and butterflies with a high threat category are often known from a small range and a thin series. Host-plant loss leaves little to recount.
Kaplan's Thestor is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Kaplan's Thestor, Wikidata item Q5457101. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
