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The order of presentation of tribes in the pages following is given in
the Introduction, with some indication of the reasons for the sequence.
The scale of measurement given in descriptions of new species is from
the centre of the thorax to the forewing apex.
Information on habitat preference has been gained almost entirely from
light-trap surveys of G. Kinabalu (Holloway, 1976), the G. Mulu National Park
(Holloway, 1984a, 1989), from collections made by Col. M.G. Allen and colleagues
in Brunei, by W. Boyd-Wallis in Kalimantan and by A.H. Kirk-Spriggs (National
Museum of Wales) in Sabah. Additional data on the fauna of softwood plantations
and material from the Forest Research Centre Collection, Sepilok, have kindly
been made available by Mr Chey Vun Khen of the Sabah Forest Department, together
with some life history data. Similar data for Peninsular Malaysia have been made
available by the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM). Broad vegetation
categories were discussed in Part 4 of this series.
Data on geographical range are mainly from the collections of The
Natural History Museum (BMNH), but with some data from the National Museum of
Natural History, Washington (USNM). Considerable information on the Sumatran
fauna has been made available through the collecting activities of Dr E. Diehl
and other members of the Heterocera Sumatrana Society as indicated on p. 285.
Data for Peninsular Malaysia are supplemented from the collections of Mr
H.S. Barlow and FRIM, and those for the Philippines from the collection of Mr C.
G. Treadaway. Recent publications on the fauna of Nepal (Sato, 1993; Yazaki,
1992, 1993a) have also been a valuable source. Records for Thailand and Vietnam
have been provided by Dr D. Stüning.
Many host-plant data are drawn from unpublished records of the
International Institute of Entomology. These are collated from material
submitted to the Institute for indentification from throughout the
Indo-Australian tropics. Of particular note in recent years are records on
material submitted by the Indian Central Agricultural Research Institute station
in the Andaman Is.
Holotypes of new taxa have been deposited in The Natural History Museum
except where indicated to the contrary.
Nomenclatural details of all genus-group names are to be found in
Fletcher (1979), and are therefore not repeated here. Fletcher did not indicate
generic gender. Whilst the Code of Zoological Nomenclature stipulates that
adjectival species-group names should agree in gender with the genus-group name,
the application of this in the Geometridae is fraught with difficulty. The
ending -aria has been applied to species extensively and traditionally
for the family by early authors, including type species originally designated in
genera ending in -odes, indicated to me to be masculine by colleagues
(see Sato, 1990a)! The rule appears to be honoured more in the breach. Given
modern requirements for computerised database construction, and given the
confusion that rectification would be likely to cause amongst users of
biosystematics not familiar with the niceties of the Latin language, all species
names given here have the orthography of the original description. The reader
should also note that the convention of putting author names in parentheses,
where the genus of combination is not the original one, has not been followed,
as the situation is clear from the synonymy attached to each species treated.
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