TRIBE TIMANDRINI
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Timandra Duponchel

Type species: griseata Petersen, Europe.

Synonym: Calothysanis auctorum (Calothysanis Hübner is a synonym of Scopula Schrank).

All species in this genus have facies much as in the Bornean species, leading to their being termed 'blood-veins'.

The male genitalia have the uncus and socii rather short, but the valves are highly complex, divided into two, with a slender digitate process arising from the base of the cleft between them. The costal arm is more laminate, less heavily sclerotised, except for the costa running to about the centre of the arm where it terminates in a separate spur or spatulate process. The saccular arm is narrower, more digitate, sclerotised, with a strongly setose ventral margin.

The female genitalia have a signum as discussed in the tribal diagnosis. The lamellae vaginales are complex, usually densely scaled.

Prout (1913, Gross-Schmett. Erde 4: 47) and Sato (1970) described the early stages. The egg is a regular oval, covered with oval pitting. The larva is rather rugose, unequally thickened, the head and T1-2 small, metathorax widening to A1 which is much swollen and laterally dilated, the remaining segments being slightly swollen laterally.

The larvae of Japanese species were illustrated by Sato and by Sugi (1987). They have a disruptive reticulate patterning of black and shades of grey, tending to be more blackish on the ventral surface, this black extending up laterally on most of the central segments to surround a small white spot. The hosts in Japan and noted by Prout elsewhere are Rumex and Polygonum (Polygonaceae). Bell (MS) described the very similar larva of T. nelsoni Prout in S. India and also recorded Polygonum as host-plant.

The pupa (references above and Nakamura (1994)) is slender, angular, reminiscent of some butterfly pupae. The frons has a heavy, bilobed protruberance with many minute hooked setae at the apices of the lobes. The cremaster is elongate, rectangular, apically bilobed, with the distal pair of hooks set on the lobes. The other three pairs of hooks are spaced widely along the sides of the rectangle. All eight pairs are small. The pupa is attached by the frontal protruberance and the cremaster in an upright position on a silken web.

The genus is predominantly Palaearctic and subtropical Oriental, but a few taxa occur in Sundaland, and one in Sulawesi. As well as the species discussed below, there is T. commixta Warren in Java, though the genitalia of this differ little from the Himalayan T. convectaria Walker and its Luzon subspecies baguionis Prout. The species in Sulawesi (slide 18297) is probably close to convectaria but is genitalically distinct.

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