Acentropus. 133 



Let us now bring together, as a connected narrative, 

 the scattered observations on the habits of Acentropus. 



Olivier and Latreille say nothing about its mode of 

 life, but from its having been described as a Phrtjganea, 

 we may infer that it was found in the neighbourhood of 

 water. " Found on willows,^^ near a canal, was Stephens' 

 account ; '' in an osier bed,'' was Brown's first report. 

 Kolenati, however, in 1846, discovered that the imago 

 affected certain species of Potamogeton, and suspected 

 that the pond-weeds were the food-plant of the larva; 

 informed by Haliday of Kolenati's observations. Brown, 

 who in 1855 and 1856 captured the moth flying over the 

 river Trent, was enabled to find pupae in 1857, and in the 

 following year to obtain both larvae and pupae. 



Previously to this, Curtis and Dale had found, at Glan- 

 ville's Wootton, what they supposed to be the eggs of 

 Acentropus ; they were exhibited at the Meeting of this 

 Society on the 4th of September, 1854, and are described 

 in the ' Proceedings' as " a large mass of white and very 

 elongated eggs." The oviposition was not actually seen, 

 but the eggs were found at a spot where Acentropus 

 abounded, and near a female specimen which was cap- 

 tured, and exhibited at the same meeting ; and there 

 cannot, I think, be any reasonable doubt that they were 

 really the eggs of Acentropus. I suppose these eggs 

 have gone to the Antipodes with the rest of Curtis's col- 

 lection; but Hagen saw them, and has described them 

 as "a number of white roundish eggs, lain thickly 

 together on a Potamogeton leaf." There is, however, a 

 discrepancy between the two accounts as to the shape of 

 the eggs. In 1861, Knaggs had some eggs laid on his 

 setting boards, by specimens captured at Hampstead ; 

 he described them as having " a most striking resem- 

 blance to those of Paraponyx stratiotalis." Herrich- 

 Schaffer, in the same year, figured the female specimen 

 on which Moschler based the species A. latipennis, and 

 he depicts her with a string of eggs at her tail ; M'Lachlan 

 has shown me one of his Hampstead examples with a 

 similar string, and Knaggs has a continental A . latipennis 

 with eggs attached. In these cases, the colour of the 

 egg is dirty-white, or yellowish ; and the shape is 

 " roundish," rather than " very elongate." 



The larva is of a light green colour, and like those of 

 Hydrocampa, Paraponyx, and Cataclysta, it lives on 



TRANS. ENT. SOC. 1872. — PART II, (MAY.) L 



