Calonotos helymus subsp. craneae

Cock, Matthew J. W. & Laguerre, Michel, 2022, Taxonomic changes in the Neotropical wasp moths, Euchromiina and Ctenuchina (Lepidoptera, Erebidae, Arctiinae, Arctiini) relating to the fauna of Trinidad & Tobago, with descriptions of new species, Zootaxa 5222 (2), pp. 101-132 : 104

Calonotos helymus (Cramer, 1775, in Cramer 1775–1782) ssp. craneae Fleming, 1957 new status

Figs. 4–6 . BIN: BOLD:AAK1636.

Cramer (1775–1782, p. 4, pl. 2 D, E) described C. helymus from Suriname, with two illustrations representing dorsal and ventral views. There is no known type material. Cerda (2008) treats this species from French Guiana and illustrates the adult male in dorsal view and male genitalia. Kaye & Lamont (1927) recorded C. helymus from Trinidad on the basis of an undated Lamont specimen from Palmiste. There is a female Phoenicoprocta vacillans trinitatis morph (i.e. the female morph of P. vacillans that Rothschild (1912) described as Antichloris trinitatis with plain dark forewings—see Fleming (1957)), with an identification label as C. helymus from Lamont’s collection in NMS. We accept this misidentified specimen as the basis for Kaye & Lamont’s (1927) record of C. helymus from Trinidad, and there have been no other records of C. helymus from the island.

Fleming (1957) described C. craneae from Trinidad, based on a type series of 30 males and 24 females. The holotype can be seen on-line ( AMNH 2022a). This species has subsequently been referred to in Trinidad by Beebe & Kenedy (1957), Blest (1964) and Cock (2003). Based on the Trinidad material examined, females typically have three forewing spots ( Fig. 6 ), whereas the spot in space 3 (M 3 -Cu 1) is reduced or sometimes absent in males ( Fig. 4 ).

In a parallel case to C. aterrima above, DNA barcodes ( Fig. 1 ) and the male genitalia of Trinidad material show that C. craneae is the same as C. helymus as found in French Guiana ( Cerda 2008). Similarly, specimens with the forewing plain black are not found in Trinidad, and the white spotted form is not found in French Guiana.Accordingly, we consider it appropriate to treat C. craneae as a subspecies: C. helymus craneae Fleming new status.

In Trinidad, C. helymus craneae and C. aterrima tripunctata are both common and can be easily confused. However, as Fleming (1957) pointed out, they can be separated by the green markings on the abdomen. The dorsal green band starts on the anterior margin of abdominal segment 1 in C. aterimma ( Figs. 2 , 3 ), but on the anterior margin of abdominal segment 2 in C. helymus ( Figs. 4–6 ); further C. helymus has a white spot on either side of this line on A1, not present in C. aterimma .

Figures

FIGURE 1. Neighbour-joining similarity tree for selected Calonotos sequences. The evolutionary history was inferred using the Neighbor-Joining method (Saitou and Nei 1987). The optimal tree with the sum of branch length = 0.25886344 is shown. The percentage of replicate trees in which the associated taxa clustered together in the bootstrap test (1000 replicates) are shown next to the branches (Felsenstein 1985). The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths (next to the branches) in the same units as those of the evolutionary distances used to infer the phylogenetic tree. The evolutionary distances were computed using the Kimura 2-parameter method (Kimura 1980) and are in the units of the number of base substitutions per site. The analysis involved 21 nucleotide sequences. Codon positions included were 1st+2nd+3rd+Noncoding. All ambiguous positions were removed for each sequence pair. There was a total of 676 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA7 (Kumar et al. 2016). DNA barcodes from our work are available in BOLD dataset DS-CALON.

FIGURE 2. Male Calonotos aterrima tripunctata, Trinidad, Cumaca Road, 4.6 miles, MVL, 21.x.1982 (M.J.W. Cock) [MJWC]

FIGURE 3. Female Calonotos aterrima tripunctata, Trinidad, Curepe, at light, 24.vi.1978 (M.J.W. Cock) [MJWC]

FIGURE 4. Male Calonotos helymus craneae, Trinidad, above St Benedict’s, MVL, 26.v.1981 (M.J.W. Cock) [MJWC]

FIGURE 5. Male Calonotos helymus craneae, Trinidad, Curepe, MVL, 5.i.1980 (M.J.W. Cock) [MJWC]

FIGURE 6. Female Calonotos helymus craneae, Trinidad, Cat’s Hill, on flowers of Austroeupatorium inulaefolium, 24.ix.2019 (J. Morrall) [MJWC]