156 Waterhouse and Lyell, a New Butterfly. [voi^xxix. 



DESCRIPTION OF A NEW LYC.ENID BUTTERFLY, 

 WITH NOTES UPON ITS LIFE-HISTORY. 



By G. a. Waterhouse, B.Sc, B.E., F.E.S., and G. Lyell, F.E.S. 



(With Plate.) 

 {Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, 20th Jan., 1913.) 

 As long ago as October 1897 we captured a female butterfly 

 at Como, some thirteen miles south of Sydney. It suggested 

 Pscudodipsas cyrilus of Anderson and Spry, but was of smaller 

 size, frailer build, different shape, and with broader markings 

 beneath. In February i8g8 we caught another female in the 

 same locality, and still another reached us from the Dandenong 

 Ranges, Victoria, in November 1902. We took yet another of 

 the same sex at Killara a few miles north-west of Sydney in 

 January 1904. 



Whether the female of the rare P. cyrilus was singularly 

 variable, or whether the butterflies in question represented a 

 quite distinct species, was a difficult question to determine, 

 especially in the absence of the male. All doubts have now 

 been cleared up by the discovery at Ocean Grove (Victoria) of 

 the ova larvae and pupse of the smaller species, and the breeding 

 from them of a long series of both sexes, constant in size, 

 shape, colours and markings. 



In October 1910 one of our fellow members, Mr. H. W. 

 Davey, while searching ants' nests for Coleoptera, came across 

 LyCcenid larvae, and from them bred Miletus ignita and a couple 

 of examples of the butterfly that had puzzled us. The fol- 

 lowing year he sent us some pupae of both species, and from 

 these we bred in Gisborne a small series of each. In October 

 1912, under the guidance of Mr. Davey one of us visited Ocean 

 Grove, Victoria, and secured a series of the eggs, larvae and 

 pupae of both butterflies. 



The ova of the Pseudodipsas we found in patches of 40 to 50 

 (evidently each patch the produce of a single female) upon 

 small dead tree stumps within a plantation of Golden Wattle, 

 Acacia pycnantha. Some of these patches of eggs were 

 deposited upon stumps at least ten yards distant from the 

 nearest A. pycnantha tree, and it seemed impossible that larvae 

 fresh from the egg could travel so far to the foodplant. Both 

 larvae and pupae were found sheltering within the galleries of 

 the nests of the little black ant Iridomyrmex nitidus, and these 

 ants were present in each of the stumps upon which we noticed 

 ova. We brought away not only ova, larvae, pupae, and two 

 captured butterflies, but also two colonies of the ants with 

 their larvae and pupae, and several of the smaller stumps. 

 Both in Gisborne and in Sydney we bred from these pupje a 

 long series of both sexes of the butterfly. These emerged 



