Acraea regalis Oberthür, 1893

Liseki, Steven D. & Vane-Wright, Richard I., 2018, Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: Nymphalidae subfamily Helconiinae, Journal of Natural History 52 (39 - 40), pp. 2511-2552 : 2524

Acraea regalis Oberthür, 1893

d ’ Abrera 1997: 173 (as A. braesia , lower 2 figures only; upper 2 figures are true braesia ). SI: Figure 8a – d.

Forewing length: male 24.0 – 33.5 mm [mean (n = 27) 29.20 mm, SD = 1.943]; female 23.0 – 30.0 mm [mean (n = 5) 26.52 mm, SD = 2.010].

Note: Following the general tradition since Eltringham (1912), this species was treated by Ackery et al. (1995, p. 232) as a form of A. braesia , and this was in effect followed, without mention of the name, by d ’ Abrera (1997). Larsen (1996, p. 374) strongly suspected that it represented a separate species, a view already taken by Kielland (1990, p. 163) and supported by Pierre (e.g. Pierre and Bernaud 2014). Kielland (1990) stated that the two differ in their male genitalia – but Eltringham (1912, p. 171) considered the genitalic differences he observed, in both sexes, were not constant. Even so, it does seem possible to differentiate the two taxa reliably based on a combination of forewing characters, including the more frequent presence ( braesia ) or more frequent absence ( regalis ) of a postdiscal black spot in forewing cell R 1, and in regalis the orange coloration in cell R 5 extending proximad at least as far as opposite the base of R 3, with the overall orange coloration of the discal area also far more extensive (as presented in SI Figure 8).