Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: family Pieridae, subfamily Pierinae

Abstract

This paper, which presents an annotated checklist of the whites (Pieridae: Pierinae), is the third in a series on the butterfly fauna of Mount Kilimanjaro. Four genera (Colotis, Nepheronia, Belenois, Mylothris), with a total of 10 included species, are known to occur within the main forest zone, from c.1800 to c.2800 m. Of the species, only Mylothris sagala appears restricted to the primary forests. The fauna from the lower slopes, below 1800 m, is far richer, with a total of 11 genera and 40 species listed. An identification key to the genera of Pierinae that occur in Tanzania, together with a key to the adults of all pierine butterflies considered to occur or have occurred on Kilimanjaro, with 310 colour images, are included as online Supplementary Information.

Keywords:

• Africa
• Tanzania
• taxonomy
• keys
• checklist
• inventory
• monitoring
• climate change
• distribution
• variation

Acknowledgements

In addition to the numerous individuals and several institutions listed in Liseki and Vane-Wright (2011), we also thank Geoff Martin, Martin Honey, David Lees and Blanca Huertas at BMNH, and Darren Mann and James Hogan at OUMNH for their assistance in accessing the collections in their care. We are also very grateful to BMNH Library staff and Valerie McAtear at the Royal Entomological Society for help with literature, and David Ponsonby at Canterbury Christ Church University for laboratory facilities. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for a number of suggestions, most notably to the reviewer who urged us not to adopt, for the purposes of this work, the recently proposed separation of Afrodryas.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00222933.2014.886343