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The
scale of measurement given in description 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),
from collections made by Col. M.G. Allen, T.W. Harman and colleagues in Brunei,
by G. Martin in Kalimantan and by A.H. Kirk-Spriggs and Dr S.J. Willott in Sabah. The Willott data provide indication in some instances of preferences for
undisturbed versus logged forest and canopy versus understorey flight (Willott,
1999). Additional data on the fauna of softwood plantations and material from
the Forest Research Centre Collection, Sepilok, have kindly been made available
by Dr Chey Vun Khen of the Sabah Forest Department (Chey, 1994). 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 additional data on the Sumatran fauna that have
been made available through the collecting activities of Dr E. Diehl and other
members of the Heterocera Sumatrana Society (Kobes, 1997). This material is
currently divided between Prof. L.W.R. Kobes and the Zoologische Staatssammlung,
Munich;
records from these sources are sited as (HS / K) and (HS / ZSM) respectively.
Data for Peninsular Malaysia are supplemented from the collections of Mr H.S.
Barlow. The author has been helping Dr V.S. Kononenko with identification of
Noctuidae from Thailand, particularly from the collection of Brother Amnuay
Pinratana (see Kononenko & Pinratana); records of species in Thailand
flagged (VK) are from this source, which also includes data for the country
accumulated by G. Behounek and the late M. Hreblay made available to Dr
Kononenko, as well as from collections in Bonn made by W. Speidel and D.
Stüning. Records from Micronesia
combine data in Fukushima (1947) with
observations made by the author on material in the B.P.
Bishop Museum, Honolulu, and the U.S.
National Museum (Smithsonian Institution), Washington.
The
genera Lacera Guenée, Platyja Hübner, Speiredonia Hübner and Xanthanomis Hampson are
under study jointly with Dr A. Zilli and others. It is possible that names of
new species in Speiredonia and Lacera will be
published first in this account, but the description in the jointly authored
publications should be treated on the valid ones for purposes of priority.
However, the two new species of Xanthanomis are described
formally here under the joint authorship of Holloway & Zilli.
A few
host-plant data are drawn from unpublished records of the International
Institute of Entomology. These are collated from material submitted to the
Institute for identification from throughout the Indo-Australian tropics. Of
particular note in recent years are records from material submitted by the
Indian Central Agricultural Research Institute Station in the Andaman Is. All
such records for the Oriental tropics have now been published by Robinson et al. (2001), though
those for the Australasian tropics mostly have not; they are, however,
available on the internet through the HOSTS database (Robinson, 1999). Robinson
et
al.
have brought together information from all the published sources cited in
previous parts of this series, and so these will not be referred to
independently unless of specific interest. A few records derive from a major project in Papua New Guinea conducted by S.E.
Miller, V. Novotný and colleagues to obtain data on insect herbivore loads and
specificity for selected plant taxa. More details
of this are published in
Novotný et al. (2002), Miller et al. (2003) and Holloway &
Miller (2003), and records from this project are cited as Miller et al. (unpublished).
Plant nomenclature follows Mabberley (1987). Larval descriptions have been
obtained from a variety of sources as cited in the text following. A useful review
of those published for India in the first half of the last century was
published by Pant & Chatterjee (1951), but this does not include species
covered in manuscript by T.R.D. Bell.
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 Nye (1975), and are
therefore not repeated here. Nye did not indicate generic gender. Whilst the
Code of Zoological Nomenclature stipulates that adjectival speciesgroup names
should agree in gender with the genus-group name, the application of this is fraught with difficulty (Holloway,
1993[4]; Sommerer, 2002). 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 as recommended by Sommerer (2002). 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.
Efforts
have been made to examine all relevant type specimens. Most are in The Natural
History Museum but there are also significant holdings in the University
Museum, Oxford (mostly material collected by Alfred Russel Wallace in Sarawak
and described by Francis Walker) and in the Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum
“Naturalis”, Leiden (types of Snellen, Heylaerts, van Eecke and Roepke).
Nielsen,
Edwards & Rangsi (1996: 3; also notes 645, 651) stated that
infrasubspecific names of Strand, mostly based on unnamed ‘ab.’ categories of
Hampson (1912), were validated by Gaede (1937-1938) in Gross-Schmett.
Erde 11. This opinion is followed here, but the Strand names are only
listed in the synonymies for each species when so validated by Gaede and when
of relevance at a subspecific or specific level (e.g. in Trigonodes Guenée on p. 73
and in Ercheia Walker on p. 83).
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