1987] 
Windsor — Tortoise beetle, Acromis sparsa 
141 
EW 
Fig. 4. Dorsal (left) and ventral (right) views of (A) a large female and (B), a large 
male Acromis sparsa. Note the hole “H” in the elytra of the male. The six measure- 
ments taken from pinned specimens were: “PW” = pronotum width, “PL” = prono- 
tum length, ‘“EL” = elytra length, “EW” = elytra width, “ED” = elytra diagonal and 
“FM” — femora length. 
two from the pronotum and one from the hind femora, from 30 
pinned females and 71 males spanning much of the size distribution 
in each sex. Regressions were calculated for all pairwise combina- 
tions of these six measurements in each sex — 30 regressions in all. 
The simple linear regression coefficients ranged from 0.922 to 0.983 
indicating good fit to linear models throughout. Male and female 
regression lines were parallel in six of the fifteen possible compari- 
sons and three had equal intercepts (Table 4). 
Graphed against femur length, there were no differences between 
the sexes in the slope of regression lines for pronotum length, elytra 
width or elytra length. Only elytra width had a significantly different 
intercept. For any given body size, the elytra of females were slightly 
wider than those of males. Elytra diagonal length and pronotum 
width increase much more quickly in males than females relative to 
femor length (Fig. 5). However, there is little if any sexual difference 
in these characters in the small end of the size distribution. 
