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Fodina Guenée
Type
species: oriolus Guenée,
Bangladesh.
The
species are typically moderately robust, and the wings strikingly marked. The
forewings are dark brown with an oblique white or paler brown bar dividing them
from the centre of the costa to the tornus, and with a finely banded pale brown
to whitish marginal zone. In some species the central band continues basad along
the costa and also there may be an additional loop or semicircle at its tornal
end. The hindwings are usually yellow with a dark brown border that is broadest
around the apex. The male antennae are filiform. The lower clypeofrons is
unscaled.
In the
male abdomen, the eighth segment is not modified or only slightly so. The
genitalia of the type species have the apical part of the valve divided into two
digitate processes that cross over each other. The juxta is massive, arising
from the valve bases to expand into a winged structure that terminates in a
long, upcurved horn. In the only Bornean species, the uncus has a scaphial
structure similar to that in Macrobarasa Hampson
(Holloway, 2003) or, less close, the Scoliopterygini (p. 213). The valves are
narrow, weakly divided distally, and the juxta is much weaker, with tapering
processes directed dorsally from where its margin fuses on each side with the
valve sacculus. The vinculum is closely associated with valve bases in both
species, and there is no saccus.
The
female of the type species has the ostium within the meeting point of the
posterior corners of the seventh tergite and the bifurcate apex of the reduced
seventh sternite. The ductus is very short and the corpus bursae is elongate,
sausage-like, with general scobination and corrugation near the basal two-thirds
up to a large, bluntly and asymmetrically triangular signum.
The
genus is found (Poole, 1989) throughout the Old World tropics to Australia and
as far east as New Caledonia (but not recorded there by Holloway (1979);
material in USNM). It is possibly more diverse in areas with a marked dry
season; there are many species described from Madagascar.
The
larvae of two Indian species have been described: F.
stola Guenée
(Gardner, 1941, 1948a; Bell, MS); F. pallula Guenée (Gardner, 1948a; Sevastopulo,
1944). They have a full complement of prolegs that are approximately equal in
size. The crochets are heteroideous, a short row at each end of the mesoseries
being abruptly smaller. The colour in stola is
very variable, the head yellow to pale brown or reddish. The body is black and
yellow (Bell referred to a watery blue ground virtually obscured by these
colours), the black varying in extent, from four thick transverse marks on each
segment to being more continuous, restricting the yellow to entire or broken
dorsolateral bands, often wider on A8, and distinct spiracular bands. The
spiracles are black. In pallula the colour is mostly pale green with
paradorsal white lines and some dorsal white spots. There are black spots on T1
and A2 and also on A8.
Pupation
is in the soil in a thin cocoon. The pupa lacks a bloom.
The egg
in stola
is
a low dome, pearly yellow white, with 34-38 ridges running up from the base,
though only about 10 of these extend up to the micropyle, the rest terminating
at a variable distance from it.
Host
records are all from the Apocynaceae: Holarrhena,
Tabernaemontana,
Vallaris
(see
also Common, 1990, and Robinson et al., 2001).
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