Erynnis montanus neomontanus Murayama & Yoshisaka, 1959

Chiba, Hideyuki, Tsukiyama, Hiroshi, Liang, Jia-Yuan, Wang, Shou-Ming, Shen, Zong-Yu & Hsu, Yu-Feng, 2020, The types of skippers described by Shu-Iti Murayama (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae), Zootaxa 4801 (2), pp. 280-290 : 281

Erynnis montanus neomontanus Murayama & Yoshisaka, 1959

Tyô to Ga 10(1): 14.

Labels: “ Taiwan Hori (=Puli, in Chinese character)/1955/S. MURAYAMA,” “ E. montanus /neomontanus/ Mur&Yoshisa/ka HOLOTYPE.”

A male specimen was designated as the holotype by Murayama & Yoshisaka (1959), and the specimen was retrieved in LBM ( Figs. 4–6 ; Dried Insect Database Reg. no. 1500022024).

This taxon was described based on 2 males sent from Mr. Masato Watanabe to Mr. Michio Yoshisaka. They were among worn out butterfly specimens from Taiwan, and the authors claimed that it was improbable that specimens from Honshu, Japan were mixed in. The collecting locality was not certain and Puli, central Taiwan, was assigned with a question mark. In those days, Puli, a small town located in central Taiwan, was the place to accumulate specimens, and butterflies and some moths came from all over Taiwan. Butterflies also arrived from foreign countries in order to utilize their wings for art display. The authors of the taxon claimed that the type specimens were extremely similar but different from the Japanese and Korean samples in having the yellow dots on hindwings unclearly edged. Such variation, however, is also found in Japanese specimens, and there are a few examples in which Taiwanese and Japanese (except for the southern islands of Okinawa) specimens are so similar as in this case except for some wide-spread species like Eurema hecabe (Linnaeus, 1758) or wanderers such as Lampides boeticus (Linnaeus, 1767) . Erynnis montanus (Bremer, 1861) obviously does not belong to such cases for this species is known as a montane dweller.As we have already regarded this taxon as a junior subjective synonym of E. montanus in previous publications ( Tsukiyama et al. 1997, Hsu et al. 2019), we concluded that both specimens in the type series were mislabeled .

Figures

FIGURES 1–18. 1–3. Ampittia matudai Murayama, 1943, holotype; 4–6. Erynnis montanus neomontanus Murayama & Yoshisaka, 1959, holotype; 7–9. Ochlodes siva yuchingkina Murayama & Shimonoya, 1962, holotype; 10–12. Aeromachus bandaishanus Murayama & Shimonoya, 1968, holotype; 13–15. Pseudocoladenia pinsbukana Shimonoya & Murayama, 1976, holotype; 16–18. Polytremis zina taiwana Murayama, 1981, holotype. Scale bar = 1 cm.