Acraea caecilia pudora Aurivillius, 1910

Liseki, Steven D. & Vane-Wright, Richard I., 2018, Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: Nymphalidae subfamily Helconiinae, Journal of Natural History 52 (39 - 40), pp. 2511-2552 : 2520

Acraea caecilia pudora Aurivillius, 1910

Larsen 1996: pl. 55, fig. 689i,ii (as A. caecilia ). SI: Figure 6e – h.

Forewing length: male 25.0 – 30.0 mm [mean (n = 5) 27.20 mm, SD = 1.358]; female 22.0 – 32.0 mm [mean (n = 5) 28.08 mm, SD = 3.426].

Note: Although Aurivillius (1910, p. 4) introduced the name pudora as a seasonal form of A. caecilia , which was thus clearly infrasubspecific, pudora was almost immediately adopted by Eltringham (1912, p. 182; also Aurivillius 1913, p. 268) for a subspecies, and this available name has always been attributed to Aurivillius, 1910 – a practice validated by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature ( ICZN 1999, Article 45.6.4.1).

Bernaud (2009) suggested that pudora is a separate species from caecilia , and a senior synonym of Acraea lyci Pierre, 2006 . However, A. lyci currently continues to be treated as a separate species of the natalica group (described from Singida, ‘ Sekenne ’ [Sekenke] and ‘ Zanguebar ’, Tanzania), most closely related to A. stenobea Wallengren, 1860 , and A. lygus Druce, 1875 , while pudora continues to be regarded as a subspecies of caecilia ( Pierre 2006; Bernaud and Murphy 2014; Pierre and Bernaud 2014).

Acraea lyci is externally very similar to some A. caecilia pudora , but the two are readily separated on male genitalia – the former, according to Bernaud and Murphy (2014), being more like A. oncaea (SI Figure 2a – c). It seems likely that some material in collections that has not been checked on the basis of genitalia could be misidentified (e.g. specimens of ‘A. caecilia’ from Tabora ex Rothschild Collection in NHMUK) . At present, however, we have no evidence that A. lyci occurs on Mt Kilimanjaro or its immediate vicinity. More material and dissections are needed.

The ground colour of both wings of male A . caecilia is usually more or less uniformly buff- orange (f. ‘ umbrina ’ has a grey, ‘ nebulous ’ darkening in the postdiscal/submarginal area of the forewing upperside). Females are often male-like in ground colour, or much paler, whitish on both wings . However, some rarer female forms may occur, including from West Kilimanjaro, in which the ground colour is darker, olivaceous, and the disc of the hindwing is whitened; a second female in NHMUK, from New Moshi, is comparable, although the hindwing white is very limited (illustrated in SI Figure 6g,h); in a third olivaceous female, a Hannington specimen from Kilimanjaro slopes, the whitening is no more than a trace . More Kilimanjaro material is needed, but based on what little we have seen it could be that the females on and around the mountain are darker than those of populations currently attributed to subsp . pudora occurring to the north and west.