Critically Endangered
Orachrysops niobe
Orachrysops niobe
Orachrysops niobe, the Brenton blue, is a butterfly in the family Lycaenidae and is endemic to South Africa.
The gossamer-winged butterfly
The wingspan is 24–38 mm for males and 22–42 mm for females.
Range and habitat
Orachrysops niobe, the Brenton blue, is a butterfly in the family Lycaenidae and is endemic to South Africa. It was not seen again until 1977 when Dr Jonathan Ball of Cape Town found a population at Nature's Valley 50 km to the east of Knysna.
Due to this, the land where the species breeds was procured by the South African Government and created into a Special Nature Reserve in July 2003. The Special Nature Reserve at Brenton is managed by CapeNature, assisted by a management committee and informed by research conducted by Dave Edge of Knysna.
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
This population died out during the 1980s, but in 1991 Ernest Pringle of Bedford in the Eastern Cape Province located another colony at Brenton-on-Sea. A housing development planned for the site was prevented from being built after a highly publicised campaign to save the species from extinction.
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.
Orachrysops niobe 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 Orachrysops niobe, Wikidata item Q5474760. 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.
