S. Mahunka szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 58. (Budapest, 1997)

ROVARTANI KÖZLEMÉNYEK LVIII 1997 pp. 5-8 A new Orthomiella species from Nepal (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) Zs. Bálint A new Orthomiella species from Nepal (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) - The description of a new polyomtnatinc lycacnid species is given from the subtropical region of Nepal: Orthomiella ronkayana (type locality: Koshi, Taplejung area, SW of Mamanke). INTRODUCTION Forster (1942a), whilst he elaborated the lycaenid material of the Flöne collection housed in the "Zoologisches Forschungsinstitute und Museum Alexander Koenig", gave an overall picture of the genus Orthomiella de Nicéville, 1890. According to Forster, the genus is distributed from the eastern part of the Himalayas to Formosa. Forster considered the genus as Tertiary relict, very closely related to the Afrotropical genus Cyclyrius Butler, 1897. In spite of the fact that Forster repeated the original description of Una pontis rovorea Fruhstorfer, 1918 (type locality: Northern Burma, Chin Hills), he forgot to mention that according to Fruhstorfer's opinion (Fruhstorfer 1918) Una de Nicéville and Orthomiella should be considered congeneric. Forster distinguished three species in Orthomiella, namely polytypic O. pontis (Elwes, 1887) (type locality: Sikkim) describing the new subspecies O. pontis fnkienensis (type locality: China, Fukien, Kuatun), O. sinensis (Elwes, 1887) (type locality: China, Myanmar) and O. rantaizana (Wileman, 1910) (type locality: Formosa). Later in a short, supplementary paper Forster described an additional member of the genus as O. lucida, again from China (type locality: Kwantung, Lung tao shan) (Forster 19426: 580). In his system Eliot (1973: 443) confirmed Fruhstorfer's opinion and placed the genus Orthomiella with Una de Nicéville, 1890 in the same genus group ("Una section") with the note that the couplet appears to be fairly close to the Eliotian "Petrelaea section". The opinion of Forster concerning the close relationship of Cyclyrius and Orthomiella was most probably based on the homoplasy of the male valvae, which have heavily dentated apical part (cf. figs 190-192 for Afrotropical taxa in Stempffer 1967 and Bálint and Johnson 1995 for Neotropical taxa of the Leptotes genus group, and figs 5 (F-K), 6 (A-D) and 26 (C-D) in Hirowatari 1992 for Orthomiella). D'Abrera (1986: 637) figured on his large folio plates only the taxa O. pontis and O. rantaizana. The systematic placement of Eliot was accepted by Hirowatari (1992), who revised the polyommatines of the entire Oriental and Australian regions. Hirowatari also accepted the specific division of Forster in the case of Orthomiella (Hirowatari 1992: 15), but he did not list the taxa rovorea and lucida neither as synonyms, nor as good species.