File:Helops Pluto - John Obadiah Westwood - 558 1911.jpg

Thomas Vernon Wollaston published this drawing in his book ‘Insecta Maderensia’ in 1854. In the book he thanks Westwood for providing the illustrations, ‘Particularly, however, would I draw attention to the valuable help which I have received from J. O. Westwood, Esq., whose pencil has been so elaborately employed in the figures which I am thus enabled to attach, and by whom many of the minutest of the dissections were accomplished, — with a degree of delicacy, moreover, to which I did not myself at the commencement of this Work (though I have since succeeded in anatomizing the larger portion of them, likewise) lay claim.’

Wollaston wrote the following about this species:

‘It is peculiar to lofty altitudes, where however throughout the winter months it is remarkably abundant,— occurring beneath stones on the exposed grassy slopes, from about 3000 feet above the sea to the extreme summits of the peaks. In the elevated district between the Pico da Lagoa and the Pico dos Arieros I have observed it in the utmost profusion during the early spring ; and I have likewise captured it on the upland plain of the Paul da Serra, and on most of the mountain ridges in the interior of the island. It has been also taken by Professor Heer on the Pico Grande.’