Lepidoptera Types of the Royal Museum for Central Africa

Table of Contents

Summary Introduction The Lepidoptera collection of the Royal Museum for Central Africa Aim and scope of the digitalisation programme Material and methods Results Conclusion

Aim and scope of the digitalisation programme

The specimens

As mentioned before, the types are the most manipulated specimens and the digitisation programme was focused on them. The aim was to put on internet recto and verso photographs of type material. First of all of, the primary type (holotype, lectotype or neotype) was photographed.If available, the allotype (which is usually a specimen of the opposite sex) was also recorded. When no primary type or allotype were present, a paratypewas photographed. Since it is a tradition to deposit paratypes in sister museums, these specimens are, in modern Lepidopterology, nearly as valuable as primary types.

On the photographs, the recto and the verso of all or nearly all labels were included, as well as a small lath to have an idea of the expanse of the specimen (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Left : Cymothoe arcuata Overlaet (Nymphalidae), holotype recto ; right : Bunaeopsis princeps aurata Rougeot (Saturniidae), holotype verso.

In this project, all types of Lepidoptera under the responsibility of the authors were photographed: the butterflies, the skippers and the macromoths.The Microlepidoptera and Pyraloidea (curated by others) as well as the Lymantriidae were not included. This latter family is now being revised and, when revision will be completed, the photographs of types will also be included.

Bibliographic work

Although photographing the specimens proceeded rather quickly, a big drawback was the verification of the types.Doing this verification with the original literature would have been a monumental task, so we made the choice to do it with recent catalogues, if available (1960 and later). Luckily, there is a recent catalogue for butterflies and skippers (Ackery et al. 1995), and verification did not take too much time. Here follows the list of type material for this group in the collection of the R.M.C.A. (table 1).

Unlike the butterflies and skippers, there is no single catalogue for the Afrotropical moths. Even on the catalogue level, literature on moths is scattered in different journals and books. Those that were used for the verifications of the type material are listed in table 2. Knowing that there are about 50 macromoth families, it is obvious that the coverage of this group in recent literature is far from complete.

When recent catalogues were not available, checking was done with older ones or information found the collection of The Natural History Museum, London. Table 3 shows the list of the numbers of primary types of macromoths at the R.M.C.A.

None the less, the authors were sometimes confronted with unsolvable problems. For example, two holotypes of a Saturniid species mentioned in recent catalogue could not be traced back through the zoological record and their label data could not be checked.

This shows once more the weakness of our actual state of the knowledge on African moths: only catalogues or revisions, all of them with very little illustrations, mainly in black and white, and illustrates the difficulties in identifying taxa in the absence of reliable collections.

next: Material and methods >