Sympis rufibasis Guenée

Sympis rufibasis Guenée, 1852, Hist. Nat. Insectes, Spec. gén. Lépid. 7: 344.

Sympis rufibasis Guenée; Holloway, 1976: 34.

Diagnosis

The facies is distinctive, as described above.

Geographical range

Indo-Australian tropics east to New Guinea, the Solomons and Queensland.

Habitat preference

The species is common from the lowlands to 1930m, including disturbed and cultivated areas.

Biology

The larva was described by Gardner (1947) and illustated by Kuroko & Lewvanich (1993). It is a slender spindle shape, tapering at each end. The colour is a darkish, olive green-brown, with a conspicuous pale yellow stripe along each side that extends from the head to the anal prolegs, which are splayed out behind. Kuroko & Lewvanich noted two forms of the larva: olive, greyish brown with a white stripe; green with a yellow stripe. All the prolegs have expanded plantae to give them a T-shape, and, of the abdominal ones, those on A4 are moderately reduced and those on A3 strongly so.

The host plants listed by Robinson et al. (2001) are all from the Sapindaceae: Dimocarpus, Litchi, Nephelium. However, there is also a record from Euphorbia (Euphorbiaceae) in Hong Kong (unpublished IIE records).

Taxonomic Note

Sympis rufibasis was placed in a sister-relationship to the Erebus / Erygia pairing referred to in the previous note, but this only occurred in one of the preliminary, unpublished analyses and in the tree for the gapdh gene in supporting data for Zahiri et al. (2011). This did, however, prompt the observation here that the male genitalia of Sympis and some Erebus species (compare figs 210 and 249 in Parts 15 & 16) do show similarities in the complex corematous ornamentation of the valves. Therefore Sympis is also here tentatively transferred to the Erebini from the first miscellanous sequence. In the analysis of Zahiri et al. (2011), the genus was associated with Anisoneura and the Hulodini (p. 397), but with little support; this association has not been recovered in the results of ongoing analyses (Zahiri et al., in preparation).