Mellicta

<i>Melitaea</i>

Melitaea

Genus of butterflies

"Melithea" redirects here. For the octocoral genus, see Melithaea.
For the town of ancient Thessaly, see Melitaea (Thessaly).

Melitaea is a genus of brush-footed butterflies (family Nymphalidae). They are here placed in the tribe Melitaeini of subfamily Nymphalinae; some authors elevate this tribe to subfamily rank.

Quick Facts Melitaea, Scientific classification ...

As delimited here, Melitaea includes the genus Mellicta, making the subtribe Melitaeina monotypic (but see below). For long, it was believed that Mellicta was a junior objective synonym of Melitaea, sharing the same type species (the Glanville fritillary, M. cinxia). This was in error, however; the type species of Mellicta is actually the heath fritillary (M. athalia), making the two taxa junior subjective synonyms and thus eligible to be separated again. However, several other taxa are in fact objective synonyms (or at least have type specimens belonging to the same biological species) of Melitaea and Mellicta – Schoenis and the preoccupied Lucina and Melinaea for the former, Athaliaeformia for the latter.[1]

Taxonomy

Adult Melitaea didymoides pekinensis, belonging to the large didyma group
Adult Melitaea solona evadne (minerva group)
Adult male Melitaea punica (phoebe group)

As noted above, Mellicta is considered to be a subgenus of Melitaea for the time being. The rationale is that even though the Melitaeina may not be monotypic, they do not seem to consist of just two genera (Melitaea and Mellicta) either, and recognition of Mellicta appears to leave Melitaea paraphyletic; consequently, other lineages would need elevation to distinct genus status also. As long as it is not fully known which species groups and/or subgenera warrant recognition as full genera, they are all retained in the present genus.

Species

In the following list, species-group/subgenus affiliation and type species are annotated. In the sensu lato circumscription used here, Melitaea contains almost ninety species. Most being assignable to one of the five groups/subgenera, there are a few that cannot be clearly placed with one of these at present:[2]

Mellicta group

Adult Melitaea centralasiae of the Mellicta group

Incertae sedis

  • Melitaea kunlunensis Kudrna & Mracek, 1994
  • Melitaea oorschoti Eckweiler, 2008
  • Melitaea paludani Clench & Shoumatoff, 1956
  • Melitaea tangigharuensis de Freina, 1980
  • Melitaea wiltshirei Higgins, 1941

Footnotes

  1. [1]
    Pitkin & Jenkins (2004ab), FE (2009), and see references in Haaramo (2010, 2011)
  2. [2]
    See references in Haaramo (2010, 2011)

References

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Melitaea.
Wikispecies has information related to Melitaea.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Mellicta, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.