Acraea Fabricius, 1807

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 : 2516

Genus Acraea Fabricius, 1807

egina SPECIES GROUP [ Acraea acrita Hewitson, 1865 ]

Larsen 1996: pl. 54, fig. 679i,ii. d ’ Abrera 1997: 165 (5 figs). Bernaud and Murphy 2014: 62 (8 figs). SI: Figure 6a – d.

Forewing length: male 26.0 – 32.0 mm [mean (n = 10) 29.09 mm, SD = 1.532]; female 29.0 – 33.0 mm [mean (n = 2) 31.35 mm, SD = 1.202].

Note: this is one of three closely related and rather similar-looking species, the ‘ fiery acraeas ’, all of which occur in north-eastern Tanzania – the other two being A. pudorina Staudinger, 1885 , and A. utengulensis Thurau, 1903 . As established by Pierre, and conveniently summarised by Larsen (1996, p. 373), the three can be separated by their male genital valves. Reliable records for Kilimanjaro are sparse or lacking, and more effort is needed to establish their presence or not with respect to the local fauna.

Consistent with the previous papers in this series, original references are not provided for the large number of taxon names mentioned. In all such cases the year date is separated by a comma from the author of the taxon (e.g. Lachnoptera Doubleday, 1847 ; Acraea egina egina (Cramer, 1775)) . If required, the original citations are all readily available from Williams (2018a) – which is an updated, corrected and greatly expanded online version of Ackery et al. (1995).