Tagiades Hübner [1819]

Cock, Matthew J. W. & Congdon, T. Colin E., 2011, Observations on the biology of Afro-tropical Hesperiidae (Lepidoptera) principally from Kenya. Part 2. Pyrginae: Tagiadini 2893, Zootaxa 2893 (1), pp. 1-66 : 27

Tagiades Hübner [1819] (1816–[1826])

This genus is represented by just three species in Africa ( Evans 1937), while about 13 species and many subspecies are found widely distributed in the Indo–Australian Region ( Evans 1949; De Jong & Treadaway 1993). The type species is T. japetus (Cramer) , found from Sri Lanka to the Solomon Islands. Tagiades flesus is the only species of the genus from mainland Africa. Two more species are found as separate subspecies in both the Comoros Islands and Madagascar ( Evans 1937; Ackery et al. 1995), which appear to represent successive waves of invasion from the mainland. One or both of these feed on Dioscorea sp. in Madagascar, as TCEC has found caterpillars on this food plant, but not reared them.

Food plant records of the Asian species include the monocotyledon family Dioscoreaceae (Dioscorea) ( Bell 1923a; Eliot 1978; Bascombe et al. 1999; Robinson et al. 2001; Kehimkar 2008), as well as the dicotyledon families Convolvulaceae , Stemonaceae (= Roxburghiaceae ) and Smilacaceae ( Eliot 1978; Robinson et al. 2001; Kehimkar 2008) although none of these records of dicotyledons are clearly original sources, and confirmation is desireable. Dioscorea is a pantropical genus of about 600 species, including the wild and cultivated yams. The leaves and growth habit are not dissimilar to those of the Convolvulaceae , so that the possibility of an error with regard to records from that family should not be ignored. On the other hand it may give a clue as to how the genus made the unusual switch from a dicotyledon to a monocotyledon food plant, since some butterflies are known to be initially attracted by leaf shape when looking for oviposition sites ( Rausher 1978), so that species which feed on Convolvulaceae are more likely to make oviposition mistakes by selecting Dioscorea spp. than most other plants. Of the three African species, the early stages seem to be known only for T. flesus . Tagiades is unusual amongst Pyrginae in that it has switched to a monocotyledon family of food plants, and most unusual amongst Hesperiidae , if not unique, in that it includes individual species that have been reported to feed on both monocotyledons and dicotyledons.