Acraea serena (Fabricius, 1775)

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 : 2541-2542

Acraea serena (Fabricius, 1775)

Larsen 1996: pl. 53, fig. 659i – iii (as A. eponina eponina ). d ’ Abrera 1997: 157 (8 figs; as A. eponina ; 3 rd specimen male, not ‘ female ’). Bernaud and Murphy 2014: 177 (8 figs, Malawi). SI: Figure 30a – l.

Forewing length: male 18.5 – 24.0 mm [mean (n = 10) 21.45 mm, SD = 1.373]; female 22.5 – 28.0 mm [mean (n = 10) 25.21 mm, SD = 1.346].

Note: This butterfly was long referred to as Acraea eponina (Cramer, 1780) , in the belief that its senior synonym, Papilio serena Fabricius, 1775 , applied to another species (e.g. Kielland 1990, Ackery et al. 1995, Larsen 1996, d ’ Abrera 1997, Heath et al. 2002). Recent work ( Pierre and Bernaud 1999) has, however, indicated that these do refer to the same insect, and the senior name has now been adopted for this most common and widespread Afrotropical Acraea ( Pierre and Bernaud 1997, 2014; Larsen 2005; Bernaud and Murphy 2014). In the past Linnaeus ’ s name Papilio terpsicore (often misspelled as ‘ terpsichore ’) was also often erroneously applied to this species.

A very common and variable insect, especially the females. Both sexes usually have marginal pale spots on the hindwing upperside, but in males there is a tendency for these spots to become obsolete, resulting in a solid black hindwing border, about 2 mm wide, in small proportion of males. While the maculation of males varies (including the forewing pre-apical bar: Bernaud and Murphy 2014, p. 174), they almost always have the upperside ground colour of both wings clear orange. Females usually have their forewings tinged with off- white, grey or ochre, often to the extent that clear orange is absent; in some the forewings are semi-diaphanous, and occasionally their hindwings are partly or largely off- white, or extensively maculated. Females are significantly the larger sex.