Ceratricula semilutea semilutea (Mabille, 1891) Mabille, 1891

Larsen, Torben B., 2013, Ceratricula and Flandria — two new genera of Afrotropical Hesperiidae (Hesperiinae (incertae sedis )) for species currently placed in the genus Ceratrichia Butler, Zootaxa 3666 (4), pp. 476-488 : 483

Ceratricula semilutea semilutea (Mabille, 1891) comb. nov.

Ceratrichia semilutea Mabille, 1891 . Bulletin de la Société Entomologique de Belgique 35: 65 (59–88, 106–121, 168–187).

Type locality. Nigeria: “Lagos en Afrique”. Type depository: not located.

The nominate subspecies is small (13 mm) with limited white spotting on the black forewing, sometimes completely missing, though tiny spots in some of spaces 6, 3, 2, and/or in the cell are not unusual. Very rarely there may be three subapical spots. The hindwing is bright yellow, with a black costa, almost as vivid in tone as in Ceratrichia phocion , where the two other subspecies are more insipid. The forewing underside is black with little or no ochreous scaling in the subapical area. The hindwing underside is much brighter yellow than in the two other subspecies and with fewer brown markings; there is no large brown spot at the end of the cell (the specimen illustrated has more dark spotting than usual—figure 4). Two specimens from Rhoko in the Oban Hills collected by Robert Warren are very small and have the yellow hindwing colour more insipid than material from west of the Niger River.

There are records from the mountains of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria as far east as the Cameroun border. It is local and not very common. I have seen no really transitional forms to ssp. indeterminabilis , but they may occur in the extreme west of Cameroun.