Entomologica Romanica Vol. 24 / 2020
2020
Discussion During this study, we recorded 458 lepidoptera species from the Vlăsia plain. Of these, 421 were species known to regularly occur in the area, while 33 were previously unrecorded from here, as well as from Muntenia (Table 3). Four more species were encountered in places from where they were considered extirpated. We rediscovered Ancylis upupana (Treitschke, 1835) in Andronache forest in 1982. The last record of this species from Muntenia was prior to 1900 (Rákosy et al. 2003). We encountered several populations of Lopinga achine (Scopoli, 1763) in Mogoșoaia and Andronache forests near București in 1981 and 1982 and of Zerynthia polyxena (Denis and Schiffermüller, 1775) in the foothills at Mănăstirea Dealu near Târgoviște in 1982. These two species had not been seen from these areas since the beginning of the 20th century and were considered extinct from here (Popescu-Gorj 1964, Rákosy 2013). There are a few even more recent records of L. achine from 1997 to 2004 reported from this area by Székely (2011) and at least one more record of Z. polyxena from Târgoviște in 1987 (personal observation). We documented the occurrence of Brintesia circe (Fabricius, 1775) in Argeș, a species which had a questionable presence in the area (Rákosy 2013). This suggests the presence and persistence of these species in Muntenia, most likely as localized and isolated populations. Our data suggest that the most and least annual lepidoptera flight activity occurred in June (145 species) and January (0 species), respectively. The monthly species abundance curve (Fig. 1) shows an increase in lepidoptera flight activity from March to June and a decrease from September to December, similar to that observed in the study of the lepidoptera of București (Albu and Albu 2016). We observed sporadic activity in December, as shown by the records of A. alstromeriana and E. defoliaria in (1980 and 1981, respectively). The former species overwinters as adult, while the latter flies in the late fall, making a December detection not unusual, given the occasional occurrence of warm days during this month. The February record of a S. pavonia adult hatching indoors is also consistent with personal observations of wild individuals of this species flying in March and April. Rákosy et al. (2003) compiled a list of 1916 lepidoptera species from the existing literature and museum collections representing the fauna of the entire Muntenia region, thus also covering our study area. Adding the 458 species from this study to the 78 nonduplicated species that we encountered by surveying an urban park in București during approximately the same period (Albu and Albu 2016), we arrive at 536 lepidoptera species recorded from the Vlăsia plain in the latter part of the 20th century. This represents 28% of the total of 1916 species found by Rákosy (2003). Some species, including Noctua haywardi (Tams, 1926) were recorded just recently in this area MONTHLY LEPIDOPTERA OCCURENCE Fig. 1. Line graph depicting monthly differences in numbers of lepidoptera species and specimens collected during this study. Many species were caught in more than one month, resulting in a higher monthly sum (665) than the total species number for the study (458). 7