SYSTEMATIC ACCOUNT


The scale of measurement given in description of new species is from the centre of the thorax to the forewing apex.

Information on habitat preference has been gained almost entirely from light trap surveys of G. Kinabalu (Holloway, 1976), the G. Mulu National Park (Holloway, 1984a), from collections made by Col. M.G. Allen, T.W. Harman and colleagues in Brunei, by G. Martin in Kalimantan and by A.H. Kirk-Spriggs and Dr S.J. Willott in Sabah. The Willott data provide indication in some instances of preferences for undisturbed versus logged forest and canopy versus understorey flight (Willott, 1999). Additional data on the fauna of softwood plantations and material from the Forest Research Centre Collection, Sepilok, have kindly been made available by Dr Chey Vun Khen of the Sabah Forest Department (Chey, 1994). Broad vegetation categories were discussed in Part 4 of this series.

Data on geographical range are mainly from the collections of The Natural History Museum (BMNH), but with some additional data on the Sumatran fauna that have been made available through the collecting activities of Dr E. Diehl and other members of the Heterocera Sumatrana Society (Kobes, 1997). This material is currently divided between Prof. L.W.R. Kobes and the Zoologische Staatssammlung, Munich; records from these sources are sited as (HS / K) and (HS / ZSM) respectively. Data for Peninsular Malaysia are supplemented from the collections of Mr H.S. Barlow. The author has been helping Dr V.S. Kononenko with identification of Noctuidae from Thailand, particularly from the collection of Brother Amnuay Pinratana (see Kononenko & Pinratana); records of species in Thailand flagged (VK) are from this source, which also includes data for the country accumulated by G. Behounek and the late M. Hreblay made available to Dr Kononenko, as well as from collections in Bonn made by W. Speidel and D. Stüning. Records from Micronesia combine data in Fukushima (1947) with observations made by the author on material in the B.P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and the U.S. National Museum (Smithsonian Institution), Washington.

The genera
Lacera Guenée, Platyja Hübner, Speiredonia Hübner and Xanthanomis Hampson are under study jointly with Dr A. Zilli and others. It is possible that names of new species in Speiredonia and Lacera will be published first in this account, but the description in the jointly authored publications should be treated on the valid ones for purposes of priority. However, the two new species of Xanthanomis are described formally here under the joint authorship of Holloway & Zilli.

A few host-plant data are drawn from unpublished records of the International Institute of Entomology. These are collated from material submitted to the Institute for identification from throughout the Indo-Australian tropics. Of particular note in recent years are records from material submitted by the Indian Central Agricultural Research Institute Station in the Andaman Is. All such records for the Oriental tropics have now been published by Robinson
et al. (2001), though those for the Australasian tropics mostly have not; they are, however, available on the internet through the HOSTS database (Robinson, 1999). Robinson et al. have brought together information from all the published sources cited in previous parts of this series, and so these will not be referred to independently unless of specific interest. A few records derive from a major project in Papua New Guinea conducted by S.E. Miller, V. Novotný and colleagues to obtain data on insect herbivore loads and specificity for selected plant taxa. More details 

of this are published in Novotný et al. (2002), Miller et al. (2003) and Holloway & Miller (2003), and records from this project are cited as Miller et al. (unpublished). Plant nomenclature follows Mabberley (1987). Larval descriptions have been obtained from a variety of sources as cited in the text following. A useful review of those published for India in the first half of the last century was published by Pant & Chatterjee (1951), but this does not include species covered in manuscript by T.R.D. Bell.

Holotypes of new taxa have been deposited in The Natural History Museum except where indicated to the contrary.

Nomenclatural details of all genus-group names are to be found in Nye (1975), and are therefore not repeated here. Nye did not indicate generic gender. Whilst the Code of Zoological Nomenclature stipulates that adjectival speciesgroup names should agree in gender with the genus-group name, the application
of this is fraught with difficulty (Holloway, 1993[4]; Sommerer, 2002). Given modern requirements for computerised database construction, and given the confusion that rectification would be likely to cause amongst users of biosystematics not familiar with the niceties of the Latin language, all species names given here have the orthography of the original description as recommended by Sommerer (2002). The reader should also note that the convention of putting author names in parentheses, where the genus of combination is not the original one, has not been followed as the situation is clear from the synonymy attached to each species treated.

Efforts have been made to examine all relevant type specimens. Most are in The Natural History Museum but there are also significant holdings in the University Museum, Oxford (mostly material collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in Sarawak and described by Francis Walker) and in the Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum “Naturalis”, Leiden (types of Snellen, Heylaerts, van Eecke and Roepke).

Nielsen, Edwards & Rangsi (1996: 3; also notes 645, 651) stated that infrasubspecific names of Strand, mostly based on unnamed ‘ab.’ categories of Hampson (1912), were validated by Gaede (1937-1938) in
Gross-Schmett. Erde 11. This opinion is followed here, but the Strand names are only listed in the synonymies for each species when so validated by Gaede and when of relevance at a subspecific or specific level (e.g. in Trigonodes Guenée on p. 73 and in Ercheia Walker on p. 83).


Copyright © Southdene Sdn. Bhd. All rights reserved.