Euchloe crameri Butler, 1869

Balletto, Emilio, Barbero, Francesca, Bonelli, Simona, Casacci, Luca P. & Dapporto, Leonardo, 2020, Stabilisation of some names of European butterflies (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) in their prevailing usage, Zootaxa 4780 (2), pp. 387-395 : 391

Euchloe crameri Butler, 1869

(Entomol. month. Mag., 5 (59): 271) was published as a new name for the taxon that ‘Cramer’ [recte Stoll], [1782] (Uitl. Kapell., 4: 225, Pl. 397, Figs. A, B) misidentified as Papilio belia Linnaeus, 1767 (Syst. Nat., ed. XII, 1 (2): 761, no. 84. Currently Anthocharis belia ).

The latter name was extensively used even in relatively recent times, Stoll declaredly did not mean to describe a new species, since he supposed that the specimen depicted was a female of Papilio belia Linnaeus. Therefore , ‘ Papilio belia Stoll’ has no nomenclatural status and is, accordingly, unavailable. No potential Stoll’s specimen identified as ‘ Papilio belia ’ survives in NHMUK ( Chainey 2005: 316 and D. Lees in litt.).

Stoll rather unequivocally stated that his specimen had been collected at Smyrna. However, ‘the same species’ (i.e. Papilio belia Linnaeus, 1767 ) was said to occur also on the Coast of Barbaria (i.e. North Africa), in Provence and in Languedoc (“Zy is te Smirna gevangen, doch wordt ook op de Kust van Barbaryen, als mede in het zuidelyke gedeelte van Frankryk, in Provence in Languedocq gevonden”—and “Elle a été prise à Smyrne, mais on la trouve pareillement sur la Côte de Barbarie & dans la partie méridionale de la France, Provence & au Languedoc”, in the facing French text). However, several authors assumed that the type locality of Euchloe crameri Butler, 1869 is “ Smyrna ” ( Hemming 1931, Bernardi 1947), viz. a site in an area of West Turkey where only the species now generally identified as Euchloe ausonia is known to occur ( Hesselbarth et al. 1995).

a) Accordingly, Higgins (1975) considered the name Euchloe crameri Butler the correct name for the ‘eastern dappled white’, while this name was deemed a synonym or a subspecies of Euchloe ausonia by a number of authors ( Higgins & Riley 1970, etc.).

b) Butler (1869), however, had decided to select “S. Europe (obtained by Herr J.J. Becker)”, as type locality of his new taxon. Rothschild (1914: 302) managed to find in the ‘British Museum’ the specimen that he thought to be Butler’s holotype of Euchloe crameri , interpreted as such a specimen collected in Spain and used this name to identify the ‘western dappled white’. Oberthür (1914), perhaps independently, reached a similar conclusion, to which also concurred Bernardi (1945, 1947), etc. Actually, Butler’s name was based on three syntypes, i.e. Stoll’s lost specimen from “Smyrna”, and two specimens, declaredly collected in “ Spain ” (D. Lees, in litt.) (see Fig. 1D ), still extant in the NHMUK.

Rothschild, although wrongly supposing that Butler’s name was based on a single specimen, can be deemed as having designated one of the NHMUK specimens from “ Spain ” as the lectotype, under Art. 74.6 ( ICZN 1999) .

Figures

FIGURE 1. (A). Lectotype (♂) of Pieris daplidice race nitida Verity, 1908: (d) dorsal (v) ventral (MZUF). (B). Neotype (♀) of [Papilio] ausonia Hübner, [1804]: (d) dorsal (v) ventral) (MZUF). (C). Centre: Original Freyer’s sealed box containing the Neotype (♂) of Pontia simplonia Freyer, 1829 (bottom right), together with a female of the same species (top left); Left: electronically extracted enlargement of the Neotype (♂) (d) dorsal (JME). (D). Lectotype (♂) of Euchloe crameri Butler, 1869 as designated by Rothschild (1914) (NHMUK). (E). Lectotype (♂) of Euchloe ausonia var. esperi Kirby, 1871 (5) (NMI). Labels relative to the illustrated specimens are shown on the right of each row.