Acharya franconia Swinhoe

Egnasia franconia Swinhoe, 1903, Ann. Mag. nat. Hist (7), 11: 508

Acharya franconia has been taken in some numbers at fruit bait deployed in disturbed secondary forest at Tawau Hill at Lungmanis near Sandakan (Chey, V. K., pers. comm.). The genus Acharya Moore (type species crassicornis Moore, N.E. Himalaya) contains just the type species and franconia. A. franconia shows striking sexual dimorphism according to illustrations in Kononenko & Pinratana, (2005: Plate 16), the rich brown male resembling some ennomine geometrids, having rather delicate build and bipectinate antennae, and thus might not look out of place amongst the Boarmiini genera illustrated on Plates 9‐13 in Part 11. The female illustrated by Konenko & Pinratana is smaller, darker purplish brown, more robust, noctuid‐like, with facies more as in the Episparis Walker group of genera, Pangrapta Hübner or Tamba Walker. However, females resembling the males have now been located, so that female specimen illustrated by Kononenko & Pinratana is probably not conspecific. Both sexes have angled and scalloped wing margins, the wings more elongate in the male. The wings of franconia are a rich brown. The pale postmedial of the forewing is sinuous, with an expanded, whiter portion one third from the dorsum, and that of the hindwing is distinctly double as illustrated.

The male abdomen has a modified eighth segment where the sternite has some resemblance to that in some members of the Saroba Walker group of genera, such as Lopharthrum Hampson and some Tamba species, but it lacks lateral rods. The genitalia are atypical of the Saroba group in their simple, tongue‐like valves.

The female genitalia are also not typical of the Saroba group, having fully developed apodemes on the eighth segment and no coil to the base of the very elongate neck of the corpus bursae. The ductus bursae is short but has a exteriorly sclerotised, funnel‐like antrum with a tongue‐like lip at the ostium, which is drawn anteriorly into the seventh segment by marked shortening of the sternite.

No clear pointer to the affinities of Acharya is apparent, and it is here associated with genera of the fifth miscellaneous sequence of Parts 15 & 16. There is little difference in facies between the type species and franconia, so conspecificity is possible.

Geographical range

Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Thailand (Kononenko & Pinratana, 2005: 66).

Habitat preference

Lowland secondary forest.

Genitalia: