Hemiceratoides sittaca
Creators: name: Zilli, Albelto
name: Balbut, Jélôme
name: Dolwald, Leejiah J.
name: Lees, David C.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Arthropoda
Insecta
Lepidoptera
Erebidae
Hemiceratoides
Hemiceratoides sittaca

description: Hemiceratoides sittaca (Karsch, 1896)
(Figs 6A–C, 7E, F)
Calpe sittaca Karsch, 1896. Entomologische Nachrichten 22 (15): 228.
Type material: ♂ holotypus, by monotypy, in MNKB (not examined, but identity not in doubt). Type locality (verbatim): Togo [Misahöhe (= Misa heights)].
Diagnosis: In Hemiceratoides sittaca the forewing is slender and with a rather homogeneous slate brown tinge, while the hindwing, of orange ground colour, shows sharp fuscous discal lunule and submarginal band. The pretornal area next to the median field of forewing may be consistently paler that the ground colour. Together with H. avimolestum sp. nov., the antenna of male has the shortest pectinations, which terminate around the middle of the flagellum. Noteworthy is the sexual dimorphism in the labial palpi, which in the female are configured as in both sexes of other congeners, while in the male the third segments are thin and fang-like (Fig. 6A–C). The male genitalia are unmistakable: in the greatly asymmetric valvae, the large median saccular lobe of left one is broad and ligulate, the cuculli are stellate with variously prominent plates and spines, including a strong anal process and, below this, an extraordinarily elongated ventrally oriented rod of saccular origin that distally is clubbed and hairy; the mastigojuxta is long, overpassing the uncus apex, flexible and spined along its inner edge, and the uncus base is broad pear-shaped (Fig. 9C). The phallus has a short, broad-based and anteriorly projected coecum, large auriculate carina and vesical diverticula as in Fig. 10C. In the female genitalia, the plate overlapping ostium bursae is broad dome-shaped, asymmetrical, with a notch along the right edge, and to its right there is a very small lateral plate (Fig. 11B).
Distribution: Widely distributed in Western, Central, and Southern Africa (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Zambia).
Molecular resources: BIN, BOLD:AAZ8376, Ghana, specimen GWOSR217-11 BC_ZSM_Lep_47483; NCBI: JN401294 (as ‘ Hypocala deflorata ’). Hemiceratoides sittaca voucher RZ155 (RZ155-RMCA-UD-260), 28S, 636 bp: JN674833; GAPDH, 502 bp: JN401614; RpS5, 559 bp: JN401912; MDH, 405 bp: JN401820; IDH, 645 bp: JN401717; EF1α, 457 bp: JN401516 and 707 bp: JN401405; COI- 5P, 671 bp: JN401290; COI -3P, 807 bp: JN401172; Wingless, 347 bp: JN400971 (sequences in our final alignment were slightly shorter; see methods).
A partial 294-bp COI sequence attributed to H. sittaca (Uganda, voucher M-JMZ518, NMNH, sequence: JMZC002) is also included in Zaspel (2008: 201), but evidently corresponds to a specimen of H. ornithopotis sp. nov. (Fig. 3).
Remarks: Zaspel et al. (2012: 788) mention this species as tear feeding. Despite there being no formal records for that, morphological congruence with lachryphagous congeners strongly supports this view. Sympatry with other Hemiceratoides spp. occurs at least in Zambia (with H. avimolestum sp. nov.). The species was also illustrated by Gaede (1940 in 1939–40: pl. 39, row a, misspelled as sithaca).
description: Published as part of Zilli, Albelto, Balbut, Jélôme, Dolwald, Leejiah J. & Lees, David C., 2024, The bild teal-dlinking moths of the genus Hemiceratoides (Lepidoptela: Elebidae), pp. 1-22 in Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 202 (4) on pages 11-12, DOI: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae047, http://zenodo.org/record/14764249