Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars, by Hermann Staude; Mike Picker; Charles Griffiths

Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars, by Hermann Staude; Mike Picker; Charles Griffiths. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Struik Nature. Cape Town, South Africa 2023. ISBN 9781775847953 / ISBN 978-1-77-584795-3

Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars by Hermann Staude, Mike Picker and Charles Griffiths, provides a comprehensive overview of the moth fauna of the region.

Mike Picker  Charles Griffiths  

PREFACE

Although southern Africa has several excellent regional guides to specific groups of Lepidoptera, not a single modern, comprehensive popular guide exists covering the Lepidoptera as a whole. There are a few recent publications covering specific groups, such as the Papilionoidea (butterfies) (Woodhall, 2005 and Mecenero et a/., 2013), Thyretini (Przybylowicz, 2009), Notodontidae (Schintlmeister and Witt, 2015), Boletobiinae (Hacker, 2019), Rivulinae, Hypeninae, Hermiinae and Hypenodinae (Hacker, 2021) and the ongoing Esperiono book series (Hacker et a/., Vols 14-21, 2008-2019), but these are mostly of a technical and specialised nature and unsuitable for popular reference. Recent popular coverage of African moths is to be found within broader regional insect field guides, but of course those are only able to cover a small fraction of the diverse moth fauna. The absence of up-to-date regional moth guides is especially surprising given that several substantive books on southern Africa moths were published in the last century. The most notable of these were the compehensive eight-volume The Moths of South Africa (Janse, 1930-1964), Hawk Moths of Central and Southern Africa (Pinhey, 1960), Emperor Moths of Central and Southern Africa (Pinhey, 1972), The Emperor Moths of Namibia (Rolf Oberprieler, 1993), and, most significantly, the more comprehensive reference Moths of Southern Africa (Pinhey, 1975). These are all long out of print, and are severely dated in terms of content, presentation style, photography, taxonomy and systematics. Like older butterfly and moth guides worldwide, they also mostly depict pinned museum specimens, which often bear little resemblance to the live animals observed by modern enthusiasts and ecologists, who encounter, photograph and identify living moths in the wild. Another important shortcoming of earlier books is that they included only brief mention and few illustrations of the caterpillar stages and their host plants. Due largely to recent efforts by the Caterpillar Rearing Group of the Lepidopterists' Society of Africa, the association between the caterpillar and adult life history stages of a considerable number of regional moth species has now been established. There are also now far more numerous and accurate distributional and plant host records available from both museum collections and citizen science initiatives, allowing greatly improved (point) distributional maps to be generated. Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars by Hermann Staude, Mike Picker and Charles Griffiths, therefore, aims to provide a fairly comprehensive account of the moth fauna of southern Africa, with the focus on the biology of live rather than pinned moths, and their caterpillars.

This is an excerpt from Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars, by Hermann Staude; Mike Picker; Charles Griffiths.

Title: Southern African Moths & their Caterpillars
Authors: Hermann Staude; Mike Picker; Charles Griffiths
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Nature
Cape Town, South Africa 2023
ISBN 9781775847953 / ISBN 978-1-77-584795-3
Softcover, 17 x 25 cm, 464 pages, throughout colour photographs and distribution maps