177 

 BIOLOGKJAL NOTES ON ORIENTAL HEMIPTERA, No. 2. 



J. 0. Kershaw & G. W. Kirkaldy. 



( With Plate B.) 



This memoir douls with Antestia anchorago (Thiinbercr), w some- 

 what widely distributed Cimicid of the subfamily Pentatominse. It 

 occurs in Sikkim, but has not been recorded from more Southern 

 India ; it occurs also in Assam, Burma, Tenasserim, the Malay Penin- 

 sula and Southern China, Mr. Kershaw having found it in Macao. 

 Mr. Distant (1902, Faun. Ind. Rh. I., 183) notes it from Sumatra and 

 Java, but these records apply to the closely allied Indo-Malayan 

 A. ellenriederi Breddin, which has not been discovered on the 

 mainland.^ 



The genus Antestia contains nearly 40 species, mostly conspicuous 

 Iv coloured, distributed over the Australasian, Oriental, and Ethiopian 

 Regions. A. variegatus (Thunberg) is a sometimes serious coffee pest 

 wherever that plant is cultivated in the Southern half of the African 

 Continent ; its metamorphoses have been partially described and figured 

 by Zimmermann.f The widely distributed A. partita (Walker) and 

 A. eruciata (Fabr.) are also known as coffee pests, the former also 

 feeding on Fraximus and Morinda. A. anchorago feeds in Macao on 

 Pavetta indica, one of the Rubiaceaj. 



Among some of their allies, which are similarly conspicuously 

 coloured, are the Palaearctic Eurydema spp., the American Murganta 

 histrionica and the Ethiopian Bagrada hilaris, all feeders on, and often 

 pests of, Crucifera3, while the Indian Apines concinna (Dallas) attacks 

 winter crops in the North-West Provinces. 



Antestia anchorago. 

 The female lays a batch of (usually) 8 — 12 eggs, deposited con- 

 tiguously, on the underside, occasionally on the upperside, of the leaf 

 of Pavetta indica L. The eggs are barrel-shaped, smooth, with a 

 ring of minute processes round the anterior end, within which the 

 operculum fits. There is no hinge, the operculum merely lying on 

 the rest of the egg and kept fast by the ring of processes.^ At 

 deposition they are greenish-ochreous, deepening to dull-ochreous 



* J. idlenrieikri is gratuinivoroua and sometimes a pest to rice, 

 t 1^03, Ber Land.— and F.^twirtsch. Deut>ch Ost Afrika I. 36G, PI. iv., tigs. 12—17. 

 * This seema to be a common form of egg in Cimicidae. 

 28 



