Poecilasthena subpurpureata

Poecilasthena subpurpureata is a species of moth of the family Geometridae. It was first described by Francis Walker in 1863 and it is endemic to New Zealand. A synomic species, Astheniodes polycymaria (the two species have almost identical male genitalia), has a holotype that was recorded by George Hampson as being from India, which, as Dayong Xue and Malcolm J. Scoble point out in their paper, would be a very strange distribution pattern. Louis Beethoven Prout reasonably calls this an error in his 1926 paper.