Charaxes (Polyura) pleione oriens Plantrou, 1989

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 : 880

Charaxes (Polyura) pleione oriens Plantrou, 1989

Henning 1989: 369,370 (5 figs). Larsen 1996: pl. 40, fig. 498 i,ii. SI: Figure 13a,b (male); C. p. bebra Rothschild Figure 13c,d (female).

Forewing length: male 25.5 – 32 mm [mean (n = 10) 28.76 mm, SD = 1.432]; female 30 – 33.5 mm [mean (n = 7) 31.86 mm, SD = 0.824].

Note: van Someren (1974, p. 428) gave forewing length for this population (both sexes) as 30 – 32 mm, and suggested that it is slightly larger than Charaxes p. bebra Rothschild and Jordan, 1900, from Uganda and DRC – but our figures hardly bear this out.

Records

Coastal areas inland to Usambara, Nguu and Uluguru mountains, Udzungwa Rift and Magombera Forest, at altitudes up to 1600 m, with a record by Cordeiro (pers. comm. to Kielland) from Rau Forest ( Kielland 1990, p. 108). Although not mentioned by Cordeiro (1995), he confirms that he did see this distinctive species in the forest, although it ‘ was very hard to capture ’ (Cordeiro pers. comm. 29 September 2014). There does not appear to be any Kilimanjaro area material in OUMNH or BMNH, and it is therefore not certain that this population does belong to C. p. oriens – which subspecies extends outside Tanzania to coastal areas of Kenya. Collectively, the five named subspecies of C. pleione (Godart, 1824) occur widely across a central belt of Africa, from Sierra Leone east to Kenya, and south to Angola, DRC, Rwanda and Tanzania. The female illustrated (SI: Fig. 13c,d), from western Kenya, represents the similar subspecies Charaxes p. bebra Rothschild, 1900 – which ranges from west Kenya to Uganda and northeastern DRC ( Ackery et al. 1995, p. 454 – 455; Larsen 1996, p. 302).