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Panilla Moore
Type
species: dispila Walker,
type locality not known [India, Sri Lanka, Nepal].
Most
species have facies like the Bornean ones, resembling somewhat small boarmiine
geometrids, but usually with darker brown triangles or other patches on the
forewing costa and obliquely posterior to it, both immediately distad to the
postmedial. The third segment of the labial palp is short.
The male
abdomen has the eighth segment typical of this fungus-feeding group. The
genitalia may be tufted with scales (e.g. particularly combusta
Hampson;
see below). The uncus is relatively long and slender. The tegumen has lobes
centrally on each side and there is a slender looped structure from the base of
the valve costa that curves up inside the tegumen within the diaphragma. The
juxta is a catocaline inverted ‘V’. The valves terminate in a complex set of
two or three processes of diverse shape. The aedeagus vesica is more globular
than in related genera and scobinate or with a few small spines.
The
female (terminalis Hampson comb. n.;
see below) is similar to that of Caduca Walker (see below) in having a central band of
spicules (spicules similar to those in Artigisa)
in the corpus bursae, but the appendix bursae is associated with this zone of
spicules and thus in a more distal position. In homospila Hampson,
the appendix bursae arises more basally and the spining is more distal. The
ostium is between the seventh and eighth segments as in Caduca
and
Artigisa
rather
than obliquely within the eighth as in Drepanorhina and
Diomea
Walker.
Bell
(MS) described the larva of the type species in S. India. Prolegs are absent
from A3 and A4. The head is round, with a well developed vertical sinus dividing
it into two broadly rounded lobes; its surface is rough, dull, light yellowish,
marbled with black, with little tubercles, and setae are present. The body is
dull, with primary setae on prominent, rather cylindrical tubercles. These setae
are black or white, sinuous, with some even plumose. The segments are each
ochreous brown but mostly ringed black anteriorly at the junction with the next.
There is dull yellow marbling and the hint of orange subdorsal and lateral bands
that are interrupted at the segmental junctions.
The
larva lives on fungus, often colonially, walking with a strong looping motion.
Pupation is in an ovoid cocoon incorporating particles of frass and other
substrate.
The
genus as currently recognised (Poole, 1989) extends through the Indo-Australian
tropics to Australia and the Solomons, and there are also four species in
Africa. Yoshimoto (2001b) has reviewed and illustrated many of the mainland
Asian species.
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