INTRODUCTION Eupithecia Is the Largest Genus of Geometrid Moths

INTRODUCTION Eupithecia is the largest genus of Geometrid moths, with well over 1400 current species, and more than 2200 available names. With few excep- tions, moths in the genus are small and drably coloured, and usually difficult to identify with certainty without dissection of the male and female genitalia. Fortunately the latter are in most species distinctive in both males and females. The genus is found almost worldwide, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, where true Eupithecia is not known to occur. There are however abundant representatives of other genera within the Eupitheciini in these two countries, and the tribe thus has a worldwide distribution. This might perhaps suggest a Gondwanan origin for the tribe, but the absence of Eupithecia proper from Australasia is a little puzzling in this case, since it is well distributed in every other continent, including the southern part of the Neotropical region. The Neotropical and African Eupithecia species are not yet sufficiently well known to attempt a biogeo- graphic analysis which might throw more light on this question. Eupithecia in China Although Eupithecia as a genus had been established by John Curtis in 1825, no species in the genus were described specifically from China until the last decade of the century. A limited number of species of wider distribution now known to occur in China had however been described earlier, initially from Europe, and later from areas contiguous with China, particu- larly the Himalayas, Japan and Siberia, by authors such as Achille Guénée, Eduard Friedrich von Eversmann and Hugo Christoph. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, a number of German collectors, in particular the brothers Fritz and Heinrich Dörries and the Rückbeil fam- ily, began to operate within or close to the western and northern borders of modern China, and brought back material of a number of species of Eupithecia. The Rückbeils penetrated as far as northern Tibet and Qinghai provinces. Their material found its way back to Otto Staudinger, and a little later, Karl Dietze, the latter of whom specialised in the genus Eupithecia. The first species in the genus to be described from China proper appears to have been E. kuldschaensis, described by Staudinger in <UN> <UN> 2 introduction 1892 from Kuldja in the modern Xinjiang autonomous region. In 1897 Staudinger, in his work on the fauna of the Amur region, described a number of further species which also occur in northern and western China, and in the same year Leech in the UK described two species from central western China which had found their way into the BMNH collection (E. sinicaria and E. consortaria). It was however Karl Dietze who first took a systematic interest in the genus, and amassed a large specialized collection of Eupithecia. This collection, which is now in the Humboldt Museum, Berlin, together with the collections of Otto Staudinger himself, and Rudolf Püngeler, contain a wealth of material from central Asia and the Russian Far East, most of which is still in excellent condition, and which constitutes by far the best material from western China available anywhere even today. Between 1902 and 1910, Dietze, in his monumental work on the ‘Biology of Eupithecia’ described and illustrated what we now estimate to be some- what over 20 good species in the Chinese fauna, drawing extensively on material collected in areas now forming parts of Xinjiang, Tibet and Qinghai. However, partly because of the intrinsic taxonomic difficulty of the material, partly because of the fashion prevailing at the time of assign- ing a latin name to every individual variation of pattern, and most impor- tantly of all, because male and female genitalia were not examined at the time, the resulting picture was far from clear, and has remained so till the present day. Louis Beethoven Prout surveyed the existing knowledge of the genus in Asia in two volumes of Seitz’s Macrolepidoptera of the World (Prout 1915 and 1938), but for the most part did not greatly change the taxonomy. In his 1938 work he did however introduce a few new taxa, including E. sacrimontis from China. In the two decades after the first world war, Hermann Höne, a German businessman resident in China, accumulated a very large collection of Chinese Lepidoptera, which is now housed in the Koenigs Museum in Bonn. This is by far the best collection of Chinese Lepidoptera available anywhere outside China, and contains extensive material of Eupithecia. The Eupithecia were not however examined critically until the advent of the Hungarian entomologist Dr András Vojnits, who worked extensively on this collection and those in Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, concentrating exclusively on Eupithecia. Vojnits described in all over 200 species of Eupithecia, more than half of which were from China. Unfortunately Dr Vojnits’ work was flawed in a number of respects. Although he examined older type material in Berlin, he did not until very <UN> <UN>.

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