Charaxes (Charaxes) druceanus teita van Someren 1939

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 : 889

Charaxes (Charaxes) druceanus teita van Someren 1939

van Someren 1963: pl. 18, figs 111,112,114 – 116. SI: Figure 24a – d.

Forewing length (based entirely on material from Taita Hills, Kenya): male 39 – 45.5 mm [mean (n = 7) 42.17 mm, SD = 1.598]; female 47 – 50.5 mm [mean (n = 4) 48.93 mm, SD = 0.802]. van Someren (1963, p. 238) gave male forewing length as 43 – 45 mm, female 49 – 50.

Note: van Someren (1963, p. 238) and Kielland (1990) only tentatively associated material from the Northern Highlands of Tanzania with this race. Henning (1989, p. 127) indicates that true teita is endemic to eastern Kenya (Taita Hills, and the Chawia, Wandanyi, Wesu and Mbololo forests). For convenience we include the Kilimanjaro population as subsp. teita , but its status needs to be confirmed.

Records

Montane forests and forest margins at 1700 – 2600 m on Mt Kilimanjaro, North Pare Mountains, and Mt Longido ( Kielland 1990, p. 101) . Charaxes druceanus ‘ near teita’ was encountered on Kilimanjaro, in a disturbed area of forest at 2000 m, in March 2001 ( Liseki 2009, p. 105) . Ackery et al. (1995, p. 441) list subspecies C. d. teita from the ‘ Arusha-Moshi district ’. We did not find specimens from Kilimanjaro in OUMNH or BMNH . More widely, C. druceanus Butler, 1869 , occurs as a series of some 15 named subspecies, including three others found in Tanzania, collectively covering a huge part of Africa, from Nigeria to Angola, Kenya and South Africa ( Ackery et al. 1995).