Article Sidebar
Published:
May 12, 2020Updated:
2020-05-12DOI:
10.4314/met.v31i1.6Keywords:
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
All copyright for publications belongs to the Lepidopterists’ Society of Africa NPC (LepSoc Africa) and/or the individual author(s), in terms of a Creative Commons license, which can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/, and which only allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the work, whilst prohibiting commercial use and preventing alteration, transformation of, or building upon the work. The finally formatted, printed version is under the copyright of LepSoc Africa as the publisher, although the author(s) retain the right to fully use the content of the article, provided that the publisher is acknowledged. Text extracts may be used by third parties with prior, written permission from the Metamorphosis Editor and (as a minimum) the senior author. The journal name, volume, number and date of publication must be acknowledged by the third party together with the author(s) and title of the article.
Main Article Content
Peculiar behaviour of a female Alaena margaritacea (Eltringham, 1929) (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae: Poritiinae)
Abstract
A female Alaena margaritacea was observed using her legs to groom grass blades on a slope, the type locality, near Haenertsburg, Limpopo Province, South Africa. The behaviour was video-recorded. The article describes the behaviour’s peculiarities and stages such as reiterative grooming at blade tips. Using extant literature, it posits two hypotheses for the behaviour’s function: that it involves territorial, sexual scent-marking or that it aims to repel competing feeders such as ants by the putative use of semiochemicals.
