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September 2014. Request for the identification of a sugarcane moth from a sugar plantation in Tay Ninh province, South of Vietnam. Apologies for not sending photos of the wings as samples were immersed in alcohol! Vietnam (in another post) said that it is likely a new species of sugarcane stem borer.
We asked Dave Britton at the Australian Museum, Sydney, and he asked a colleague, Andrew Mitchell, to help id the moth. Andrew Mitchell writes:
Chilo species are of special interest, and I’d be happy to field requests like this in future, especially if they are accompanied by ethanol specimens so I can both sequence them and get good genitalia preparations. The odd angle that the valves are displayed at in these pics threw me off track for a while (the ends of the valves appear bifid) but I have been placed back on target by European colleagues that I forwarded the images to. They reckon it is Chilo tumidicostalis (Hampson, 1919). I am not convinced they are correct – it would take a fresh dissection with the valves flattened to get a standardized image for comparison with slide mounted preps. Or DNA sequence data, which I am amassing for Chilo species.
