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Luceria
Walker
Type species:
novatusalis
Walker, Sri Lanka.
This and the next genus have similar forewing facies, with narrow forewings having a dark discal spot and a postmedial angled sharply at one third from the costa, but this latter is sometimes more irregular in the next genus with a more quadrate appearance to the angle. The reniform is often conspicuously darker. The hindwings are always paler and generally uniform, though there is more often a dark discal lunule and marginal dashes in Schrankia Hübner, and the margin is slightly more concave distal to the discal lunule. The ground colour is more of a pale straw colour and marked with brown in Luceria and the forewing facies is more uniform amongst the species, the obliqueness of the postmedial being always continued beyond the angle by a shade extending to the apex. This uniformity of facies makes it advisable to confirm species identity by dissection.
The male antennae are ciliate. The labial palps are directed forwards, though often with the shorter and much narrower third segment angled upwards. The proportions of the segments may be of use in identification.
The abdomen has the phragma lobes between the first and second tergites weak to absent. The former are small, triangular and well separated in Hypenodes. The male eighth segment is strongly modified. The sternite has long and often broad apodemes but is not corematous. The tergite has a slender, central, ‘Y’-shaped thickening, the bifurcation of the ‘Y’ being very small and anterior. The genitalia of Luceria have similarly complex valves to Schrankia, but they are generally shorter and broader, with a continuous costal to saccular ‘border’ that extends around the interior of the apex, and the two or three processes arise distally from the interior of this border, and are mostly directed exteriorly. There may be a slight projection to this apex, but it is more often rounded. The uncus is short to vestigial, and the saccus, if present, very shallow compared with Schrankia. The juxta is large, centrally constricted, and the aedeagus is much shorter and distally broader than is typical in Schrankia, often with ornamentation in the vesica such as spining or a large cornutus.
The female genitalia have the ostium at the apex of the rather triangular seventh sternite adjacent to the posterior margin of the eighth segment. The ductus bursae is short relative to the corpus bursae and may be sclerotised over the basal part (an antrum). The corpus bursae is elongate, pyriform, with the ductus seminalis arising at its base and directed posteriorly. The ovipositor lobes are small, rather rounded. The signum is a single spine in the centre of the distal half of the bursa or nearer its apex.
The genus extends throughout the Old World tropics, and contains some very widespread species such as oculalis Moore, but also more localised ones such as L. cooki Holloway from New Caledonia and Norfolk I., L. icasta Fletcher from Rennell I., the Banks Is. and Vanuatu, L. striata Galsworthy from Hong Kong and L. jowettorum Holloway from Cocos-Keeling I. and Sri Lanka (slide 1122). Inoue (1979) recorded oculalis from Japan but also described L. fletcheri Inoue as endemic. Fletcher (1961) treated several species from Africa. Poole (1989) listed six species described by Rothschild from New Guinea. None of these is a Luceria or a Schrankia, and they do not appear to be congeneric with each other either.
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