Amauris (Amauris) tartarea damoclides Staudinger, 1896

Liseki, Steven D. & Vane-Wright, Richard I., 2015, Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: Nymphalidae subfamilies Libytheinae, Danainae, Satyrinae and Charaxinae, Journal of Natural History 50, pp. 865-904 : 871

Amauris (Amauris) tartarea damoclides Staudinger, 1896

Gifford 1965: pl. G, fig.101. SI: Figure 4e – h.

Forewing length: male 40 – 47 mm [mean (n = 9) 44.06 mm, SD = 1.864]; female 39 – 47 mm [mean (n = 6) 43.6 mm, SD = 2.685].

Talbot (1940, p. 320, 321) included 11 named forms under A. tartarea tartarea Mabille, 1876 . Unpublished research suggests the possibility that some of these may represent separate species – and this may also apply to the two other taxa currently regarded as separate subspecies: A. t. damoclides and A. t. tukuyuensis Kielland, 1990.

Records

Amauris t. damoclides was said by Talbot (1940, p. 321) to come from ‘ Tanganyika Territory and south-east Kenya ’, implying its likely presence in the Northern Highlands of Tanzania. Kielland (1990, p. 75), however, indicated eastern Tanzania only, at altitudes up to 2000 m, from the Ulugurus to Rubeho and Mufindi – apparently unaware of Carcasson ’ s (1963, p. 24) records from Moshi and Himo. The BMNH has a number of specimens from Moshi and Taveta. The presence of damoclides in the Moshi area was confirmed by Cordeiro (1995, p. 195), who noted it as common in the Rau and Kahe forest reserves. Included here as a member of the lower slopes fauna. Beyond Tanzania, A. t. damoclides also occurs in Malawi and coastal areas of southern Kenya. Southwestern Tanzania is inhabited by an endemic subspecies (subsp. tukuyensis), whereas the highly polytypic nominate race occurs from southern Sudan to Guinea south through western Tanzania and DRC to Namibia ( Ackery et al. 1995, p.272).