Charaxes (Euxanthe) wakefieldi (Ward, 1873)

Liseki, Steven D. & Vane-Wright, Richard I., 2015, Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: Nymphalidae subfamilies Libytheinae, Danainae, Satyrinae and Charaxinae, Journal of Natural History 50, pp. 865-904 : 886

Charaxes (Euxanthe) wakefieldi (Ward, 1873)

Henning 1989: 399,400 (4 figs, as Euxanthe wakefieldi ). Larsen 1996: pl. 40, fig. 504 i. d ’ Abrera 2004: 527 (2 figs, as E. wakefieldi ). SI: Figure 19e – h.

Forewing length: male 36.5 – 44 mm [mean (n = 10) 40.91 mm, SD = 1.923]; female 45 – 54 mm [mean (n = 9) 50.78 mm, SD = 1.972]. van Someren (1975, p. 85 – 86) gave male forewing length as 40 – 43 mm, female 50 – 52 mm.

Note: In museum specimens, the blue membrane colour of the males often fades to yellowish or straw colour.

Records

Lowland forests, up to 600 m, in coastal areas of Tanzania northwards from Ifakara to the Usambaras, and inland as far as Udzungwa, Mbulu Forest and Arusha – where it may sometimes occur at 2000 m or even higher ( Kielland 1990, p. 93). Cordeiro (1990, p. 35) recorded it from Lake Manyara National Park. The BMNH has specimens from Taveta, New Moshi, Moshi and Rau, all localities at approximately 750 m. In OUMNH there are four males from Taveta collected by Rogers in 1905. Not observed in the forest by Liseki (2009). On the evidence above included here as a member of the lower slopes fauna – with perhaps the capacity to enter the lowest zone of the forest. More widely C. (E.) wakefieldi occurs from coastal areas of Kenya south to South Africa, including populations on Pemba and Zanzibar ( Henning 1989, p. 401; Ackery et al. 1995, p. 467).