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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, 1984), 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. This material is currently divided mostly 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.
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. Most of these sources also had host-plant data, but more have been published in compendia referred to in previous parts of this series, or from unpublished sources such as records of the International Institute of Entomology. These were collated from material submitted to the Institute for identification from throughout the Indo-Australian tropics. Of particular note 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 these sources, 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) and Miller et al. (2003), and records from this project are cited as Miller et al. (unpublished). Plant nomenclature follows Mabberley (1987).
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 species-group names should agree in gender with the genus-group name, the application of this is fraught with difficulty (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 of Natural History, Oxford (OUMNH; 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 and Miss A.E. Prout). |
