M. phoebe ab. tatara Krulikovsky, 1891 [TL: circa Kazan, Russian Federation] was considered by Krulikovsky to be a hybrid. In 1897 Krulikovsky said: 'Earlier I mentioned that I caught M. phoebe (male) in copula with M. arduinna (female). I suspect that ab. tatara, which was shown by me in Bull. de Moscou, 1890, pl VIII, f. g, perhaps is a hybrid between M. phoebe and M. athalia, Rott. ’.[Translation by G. Kuznetsov] [The species mentioned refer to M. arduinna (Esper, 1783) and M. athalia (Rottemburg, 1775).] Unfortunately the search by Kostjuk & Zolotuhin (2017: 445–446) in the collections of the Zoologisches Museum of Shevchenko University, Kyiv failed to find the holotype. The habitat was ‘swampy meadows’ unsuitable for M. ornata but acceptable to both M. phoebe and M. athalia; also Kazan is outside the known distribution of M. ornata. Hybrids between Melitaea species are known to occur (Russell et al. 2014; Pazhenkova & Lukhtanov 2021); also numerous interspecific, intergeneric and even intersubfamily copulations have been observed (Russell 2012a, b). In the absence of the specimen the authors can only provide a copy of Krulikovsky’s figure of this aberration or hybrid(?) (Fig. 8).

Published as part of Russell, Peter J. C., Lukhtanov, Vladimir A. & Tennent, W. John, 2022, Reassessment of the status of some European and Asian Melitaea taxa described as subspecies of Melitaea phoebe ([Denis & Schiffermüller], 1775), with designations of lectotypes where appropriate (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), pp. 25-38 in Zootaxa 5141 (1) on page 28, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5141.1.2, http://zenodo.org/record/6577627