Leodonta Butler, 1870

Braby, Michael F. & Nishida, Kenji, 2010, The immature stages, larval food plants and biology of Neotropical mistletoe butterflies (Lepidoptera: Pieridae). II. The Catasticta group (Pierini: Aporiina), Journal of Natural History 44 (29 - 30), pp. 1831-1928 : 1860

Leodonta Butler, 1870

Leodonta is most closely related to Pereute (Braby et al. 2007) . Robert (1987) briefly reviewed the species-level classification of the genus and recognized six species, although he questioned the status of one taxon. Lamas (2004) subsequently recognized only five species, treating L. chiriquensis (Staudinger, 1884) as a subspecies of L. tellane (Hewitson, 1860) . Leodonta occurs from Costa Rica ( D’Abrera 1981; Robert 1987; DeVries 1987) to Venezuela, and along the Andes to Peru and Bolivia ( Robert 1987; Constantino et al. 2004; Lamas 2004). Most species occur in cool to cold montane forests between 1200 m and 3200 m a.s.l. (though more generally between 1500 m and 2800 m a.s.l.) on the eastern slopes of the Andes and adjacent mountain ranges of northern South America ( Constantino et al. 2004).

The life history has not previously been reported for any of the species in the genus, although several authors predicted that the immature stages of Leodonta would be associated with mistletoes ( DeVries 1987; Constantino et al. 2004).

In addition to our reared material of the immature stages, we examined a series of pupal exuviae of L. tagaste (C. Felder and R. Felder, 1859) and L. tellane preserved in the BMNH and INBio collections, respectively. The BMNH material was collected from Ecuador in 1886 and comprises four specimens in poor condition. One specimen is labelled as follows: “ BMNH DES Rh. 3164 Leodonta tagaste . main coll.”, “ZAMORA Equater mars 86”, “32.21. Ex Coll. Dognin. 1921”, “Joicey Bequest. Brit. Mus. 1934–120”; the three other specimens are labelled similarly except with “Rh. 3165” on first label for one pupa, and “Rh. 3166” for the two other pupae, which are mounted together. The pupal specimens closely resemble L. tellane . Further details of the INBio material for L. tellane are provided below.