Pantoporia mera Swinhoe, 1917

Kunte, Krushnamegh & Basu, Dipendra Nath, 2024, Two new taxa of brush-footed butterflies (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) from the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, southern India, Zootaxa 5543 (3), pp. 343-367 : 363

A note on the taxonomic status of Pantoporia mera Swinhoe, 1917

Swinhoe (1917) described P. mera as follows: “ Pantoporia mera , nov. ♂. Belongs to the inara group, is smaller, the fore wing shorter, the outer margin is less concave, the pattern on the upperside is very similar, but the cell-streak is more attenuated, the white spot in it smaller, the orange submarginal band incomplete, narrower at the apex, then broken, a spot in continuation on the middle, and faint indications of a grey line downwards to the hinder angle. The underside, however, is very different to the underside of inara , especially on the hind wing, the middle white band being more even, not attenuated to a point at the abdominal fold as it is in inara ; the black discal row of spots is absent or only very faintly indicated, and the white postdiscal band is broader. Expanse of wings 22 / 10 inches. Hab. Borneo.” Thus, Swinhoe had already realised that P. mera was close to A. inara . Comparison of primary types of these two taxa and images of A. i. inara in its E Himalayan and NE Indian range reveals that the slight variation represented by the type of mera falls within the intra-population variation seen in the range of A. inara . Furthermore, the type locality of mera specified by Swinhoe—“Borneo”—is clearly in error. The phenotype of mera does not occur in Borneo, where A. nefte matthiola (Fruhstorfer, 1913) (type locality Borneo) represents a black-and-white male phenotype very similar to A. n. nefte . Thus, it is likely that the type of mera was collected in NE India, Bangladesh or N Myanmar but mistakenly labelled as being from Borneo. Therefore, based on the similarity of the type specimens ( Fig. 9 ), we propose synonymy of Pantoporia mera Swinhoe, 1917 syn. nov. = Athyma inara Westwood, 1850 .

Figures

FIGURE 9. Comparison of Athyma inara sahyadriensis ssp. nov. with other similar Athyma (see Materials and Methods for specimen details). A millimetre scale is at the bottom. Photographs: Krushnamegh Kunte.