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1963
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Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society
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27
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EXTENSION OF KNOWN RANGE OF MITOURA HESSELI by Roger W. Pease, Jr.
During a recent collecting trip to New Hampshire a female of Mitoura hesseli Rawson & Ziegler was collected in a White Cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides) bog on 19 May 1963. The collecting locality is 6 to 7 miles northeast of the Massachusetts border and can be reached by taking Route 121 north of Haverill, Mass. and making a right turn beyond Wash Pond in Hampstead, New Hampshire. The left fork is followed to the Hampstead dump on the right at a sharp turn in the road. The bog is on the left and continues to Hampstead Road. The swamp is indicated on the Haverill, N. H. — Mass. quadrangle (1956) map of the U. S. Geological Survey series of topographic maps. Only a small part of the indicated swamp contains White Cedar. There is no true eye or open water area in the bog, but there is a collecting area where the White Cedars are relatively low and openly distributed. This is the most suitable collecting site and is surrounded by dense trees and thicket on three sides. These form only a thin barrier on the side facing the road and entrance to the open area is easy and immediate about one hundred yards south of the juncture with Hampstead Road. Otherwise, the collector may have to force his way through a quarter mile of dense White Cedar. The day on which the collection was made followed a heavy rain and water was knee deep over parts of the bog. Only two specimens were seen and one caught. The captured specimen was a female which laid numerous eggs on White Cedar. These hatched and are being raised.
Besides the type locality in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and elsewhere in that state, Mitoura hesseli has been reported from the Blue Hills, Milton, Mass. (1 $ , 31 May 1941, in the collection of the Carnegie Museum) and in Southern Pines, North Carolina (1 ? , lj\ 28 July 1911 in F. M. Jones collection at Peabody Museum, Yale University). A trip to the Blue Hills in spring 1962 failed to locate any specimens.
The species is associated with Chamaecyparis thyoides, which extends along the Atlantic Cost from southeastern Maine to northern Florida. It is improbable that if M. hesseli were eliminated in any of the more isolated peripheral populations, it would be re-introduced without assistance from man. The presence of such a series of isolated populations which were once part of one great continuum might offer a situation in subspeciation similar to that between oceanic islands. It is important to look for differences between the populations of M. hesseli at the limits of its range, but first additional material needs to be collected.
Dept. of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., U. S. A.
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