Dart

Description:

Hesperiidae; Hesperiinae; Potanthus sp. nr. serina. Stating that this is a Grass Skipper butterfly is the easy part of its identification. Beyond that, it becomes slightly more difficult. Wikipedia lists 36 species from the Potanthus genus in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potanthus (Wiki does not claim it is a complete list), 9 of which are present in the Philippines, but only 4 of those have pictures, none of which looked like mine (except one which is problematic, as you will see in notes later). My favourite moth and butterfly website, Philippine Lepidoptera, shows 15 pictures of Potanthus spp. and one of those looks similar to, but not exactly like mine and it is labelled as a Potanthus serina (female) Large Dart. So I revisited Wiki, but this time I was looking for a picture of a male P. serina to see if that might match my specimen. On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potanthus_... - I saw a picture which looked much closer to mine, but did not say whether it was male or female. By the way, it turned out to be the same picture which I had already seen on the wiki species list, but now it was much larger and easier to see. So, that didn't help much.

Habitat:

Spotted in wild grasses in our backyard.

Notes:

One of the difficulties I encountered when trying to identify this specimen was that in the captions of one or two Darts shown in Philippine Lepidoptera it says "Potanthus also has obvious apiculi or hooked tips on its antennae" (slightly paraphrased to correct singular/plural typos). I am not saying that is wrong, but I have been unable to find any reference to help me with that statement. I only mention it because in most of the Philep pictures, the apiculi can be clearly seen, but in a few pictures, they are not visible. Of course, I understand that this could be down to lighting conditions or angle of view making the apiculi hard or impossible to see, but here's the real problem. The wiki picture of Potanthus serina which is, in my opinion, very high quality and can be enlarged considerably by clicking on the "More details" tab, shows rounded ends on the antennae. There is no room for error here, there is absolutely no doubt that there are no apiculi on those antennae. So, where do I go from here. My two most trusted sources are at odds with each other on a very important identifying feature of the Potanthus. This is particularly relevant to my efforts at identification because as you can clearly see, even on my very amateur photos, there is not one apiculus in sight. So I must leave it unresolved for now. I can see that the success or failure of my identification hangs on the antennae more than any other feature which may be in question.