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SUBFAMILY
ACONTIINAE |
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This subfamily is now much more restricted than it was traditionally (e.g. in Nye, 1975 and Poole, 1989), with most of the rest of the species being placed in the Aventiinae and Eublemminae as part of the LAQ clade of Mitchell et al. (2006), also as structured in the system of Lafontaine & Fibiger (2006: fig. 28) as the quadrifine Noctuidae. Only the more strictly defined Acontiinae and the Eustrotiinae remain in the sister‑clade of the trifine Noctuidae as basal groups, together with the Plusiinae and Bagisarinae. There are now only two Acontiinae and twelve Eustrotiinae in the Bornean fauna. Fibiger & Lafontaine (2005) defined the Acontiinae on three apomorphies: the presence of a pair of setal patches or more general setation on the scaphium of the male genitalia; a tympanum with an enlarged alula partially covering the tympanic opening; the tympanal hood reduced or absent. Other features listed were: general asymmetry of the male genitalia; a sclerotised crest to the dorsal margin of the sacculus; larvae with two SV setae on the first abdominal segment. See also the discussion of the Aediinae on p. 48. The larvae have the first two pairs of prolegs reduced or lost. The two major tribes, the Acontiini and the Armadini (see Wiltshire, 1979), are most diverse in semi‑arid and arid habitats at middle latitudes. The Armadini are more or less restricted to N. Africa and the Middle East, whereas the Acontiini extend to the New World and to Australasia, though their diversity attenuates through the humid tropics: seven species in Australia (Nielsen et al., 1996) compared to the two in Borneo. The Acontiini consist mainly or entirely of the genus Acontia Ochsenheimer, the species sharing many characters listed by Hacker et al. (2008) of which the following seven are particularly diagnostic: a general appearance of a bird dropping at rest produced by the forewing facies; a strong pair of coremata on the male eighth sternite; a valve with a lacuna, or thinner region distal to the saccular dorsal margin; a saccular dorsal margin that is edged with a sclerotised band or crest; a scaphium with a pair of weak setal tufts dorsally; female genitalia with a pair of strap-like sclerites extending from the ductus into the eighth segment; a sclerotised band at the distal end of the ductus that extends into the corpus bursae. Several of these features are shared more widely in the subfamily as discussed above and on p. 48 in relation to the Aediinae, but the features of the facies, the valve lacuna and the ductus bursae are generic ones. |
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