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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 W. Boyd-Wallis in Kalimantan and by
A.H. Kirk Spriggs and Dr S.J. Willott in Sabah. 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: a preliminary
account of the Sumatran fauna has been published by Schintlmeister (1994).
Data for Peninsular Malaysia are supplemented from the collections of Mr
H.S Barlow and FRIM, the latter particularly through recent surveys conducted by
Dr J. Intachat.
Many host-plant data are drawn from unpublished records of the International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. 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
Watson, Fletcher & Nye (1980), and are therefore not repeated here.
These authors 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 (Holloway, 1993[4]). 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. 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.
The high level of sexual dimorphism in many Lymantriidae, and the fact
that taxa are based on either sex, mean that it may be difficult to
establish synonymy through ‘marriage’. Several attempts to elucidate
such situations have been made in the text following, some of necessity
more tentative than others, with some striking examples in Rhypotoses and
Perina. There is undoubtedly more ‘matchmaking’ to be done in
the current systematics of the Indo-Australian members of the family.
Efforts have been made to examine all relevant type specimens. This has
meant that many observations made by Schintlmeister (1994) on the Sumatran
fauna have required review, for, as he indicated, he did not have such
ready access to types and facilities for their dissection as were
available for this current work. Nevertheless, this work has benefited
considerably from the ground he had broken, enabling the comparison of two
major south-east Asian faunas.
Type material of Strand has not been examined, as searches made on behalf
of the author in Berlin and Eberswalde, the two most likely repositories,
failed to locate any types of the Strand species occurring in Borneo, all
described in Volume 10 of Gross-Schmett. Erde. In most cases the
identity of the species has been unambiguous, but that of the Bornean
species, Cispia borneensis Strand and C. kinabaluensis Strand,
is unclear. The original illustrations show moths that could be Arctornis.
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