Abstract
The redescription of Platymeris rhadamanthus Gerstaecker, 1873 as well as the designation of lectotype and paralectotype, plus the prediction of the potentially suitable habitat was the main goal of this study. Our research were based on 262 specimens of museum collections of P. rhadamanthus species and a set of 23 environmental predictor variables, all recorded in a 1x1 km grid covering Africa. Ecological niche modelling was performed using the MAXENT analyses to produce predictive potential distribution maps for this species and its colour forms separately. The results suggested the most suitable areas of distribution of P. rhadamanthus, both for species as a whole and also for the colour forms. A jackknife test showed that the precipitation of coldest quarter and herbaceous vegetation were the most important environmental variables affecting the distribution of P. rhadamanthus. After analyzing the climatic preferences, this species seems to be related mainly to the tropical savanna climate, subtropical highland variety of the oceanic climate and humid subtropical climate. An analysis of environmental variables also showed that this species prefers areas with herbaceous vegetation, with a small participation of trees, which is probably caused by food preferences of its victims. P. rhadamanthus so far was only known that it occurs in widely understood tropical Africa. On the base of the museum data on the occurrence of the species and ecological niche modelling methods we provided new and valuable information of the potentially suitable habitat, the possible range of distribution of the species and its climatic preferences.
Highlights
The redescription of Platymeris rhadamanthus Gerstaecker, 1873 as well as the designation of lectotype and paralectotype, plus the prediction of the potentially suitable habitat was the main goal of this study
Platymeris rhadamanthus have been described by Gerstaecker (1873) on the basis of specimens collected in Zanzibar, this species is widely distributed in the tropical part of continental Africa
A thorough analysis of the distribution of both colour forms of P. rhadamanthus showed that they occur in different environmental niches
Summary
The redescription of Platymeris rhadamanthus Gerstaecker, 1873 as well as the designation of lectotype and paralectotype, plus the prediction of the potentially suitable habitat was the main goal of this study. This study is an attempt to answer the questions: which environmental niches may potentially be suitable for P. rhadamanthus, and whether there are differences in habitat preferences of colour forms For this purpose, the MAXENT (the maximum entropy model) software was employed. It is based on machine learning method and thanks to its many advantages it seems to be a well-suited method for species distribution modelling (Phillips et al, 2006) As it is reported by research studies, MAXENT seems to have a better performance and work better than other software in predicting the distribution of species, especially in the case of limited number of sample localities (Elith et al, 2006; Hernandez et al, 2006; Pearson et al, 2007). As it weighs the relative contribution of each environmental variable, it was deemed a convenient tool for evaluating predictors Through these studies we demonstrate detailed redescription of P. rhadamanthus and what are the differences in the preferences of the ecological niche of its both colour forms
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