SUBFAMILY BLENINAE
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Blenina Walker

Type species: accipens Walker (= lucretia Dalman), Sri Lanka, Australia.

Synonyms: Amrella Moore (type species
angulipennis Moore, India); Eliocroea Walker (type species chrysochlora Walker, Moluccas).

These are robust moths with cryptic, rather lichenous, grey or green and grey variegated forewings. The hindwings on the upperside are either pale (sometimes yellow) with a broad dark border or dark brown to black with a sinuous yellow or orange band medially that does not reach the costal or dorsal margins. The undersides of all wings usually have a pale ground with dark brown bands: a broad border and a narrower medial band.

The venation is of the groundplan type but M3 and CuA1 are connate in the hindwing.

The male abdomen has the basal margins of the eighth tergite and sternite excavate. There are weak hair pencils on the seventh segment. The apodemes of the basal sternite are expanded (Figs 493, 524) but not carinate. The genitalia have several diagnostic features. The uncus is narrow, rather rectangular; the subscaphium is strongly developed, distinctly bilobed. The valves are paddle-like, sometimes with a subbasal costal process (e.g.
quinaria Moore), but always with a slender curved process arising from the saccular area that terminates in an expanded structure rather like the head of a bird. The valve has a distinct thinned area in the lamina just distal to this. The exterior of the base of the valve supports an extensive corema. The aedeagus vesica contains usually one cornutus, occasionally more.

 


The female genitalia are simple with an elongate ductus and bursa, no signum, and with the ostium opening into the virtually complete ring of the eighth segment.

The larva tends to be cylindrical, moderately stout, the primary setae on pinacula that may be coloured differently from the generally apple-green or leaf green body.

Larval host plants include several records for Diospyros (Ebenaceae) but species also feed on Pterocarya (Juglandaceae) and Shorea (Dipterocarpaceae) (Sugi, 1987; Robinson et al., 2001; see below).

The genus is found through the Indo-Australian tropics to as far east as Fiji and Tonga (Holloway, 1979) and north to Japan. The species are usually rather widespread, and the five in Borneo represent the greatest richness anywhere in the range except for New Guinea. There are also a few Afrotropical species.

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