Diversidade ecológica e composição de borboletas frugívoras na Reserva Biológica Guaribas, Paraíba, Brasil.

Abstract

The Northeastern Atlantic Forest is a subregion of Atlantic Forest localized at the north side of São Francisco river, including the entire region of coast Forest between Alagoas and Rio Grande do Norte states (Santos et al., 2007). In most part of its original area, the remaining native vegetation occurs in small isolated fragments to each other. Its protected areas are small, biologically isolated , poorly protected and managed (Silva e Tabarelli, 2000, 2001). In fact, it is strategically important to implement studies for inventory and monitoring of biological populations occurring in protected areas. This allows an overall assessment of their conservation status . The objective of this study was to inventory the species of fruit-feeding butterflies occurring in the Biological Reserve Guaribas and analyze ecological indexes as richness, abundance, biological diversity and composition of these populations. In total 884 specimens were recorded from 25 species , represented by 4 subfamilies of Nymphalidae family: Satyrinae (9), Biblidinae (8), Charaxinae (5) and Nymphalinae (3). As expected, the data generated by the matrix tested corroborated of the initial hypothesis clustering data between the non-forest and forest areas, however, contradicted another premise of the work analysis, where the degree of similarity between the open areas were lower than the similarity found to forest areas