Agrilus liragus Barter and Brown, 1949

Agrilus liragus Barter and Brown, 1949 , resurrected status.

Carlson and Knight (1969) changed the status of this taxon to Agrilus granulatus liragus without any detail other than reference to the first author’s thesis, which has no taxonomic standing. They compared it only to Agrilus anxius Gory , with which it has been confused. Barr (1971) treated A. liragus as a full species, perhaps being unaware of the aforementioned paper. Wellso et al. (1976) also treated the taxon as a full species, probably following Barr (1971). Later authors, notably Bellamy (2008) and Nelson et al. (2008), who treated this taxon as a subspecies, have listed the name both ways without comment. Bright (1987) treated it as a full species, cited Carlson and Knight (1969), and stated: “I have chosen to regard it as a full species, because this seems to reflect the distributional pattern more closely.” The distribution of A. granulatus (Say) and A. liragus widely overlaps, though there may be some altitudinal separation. Given that, and that the beetle has been reared from five species of Populus ( Barter 1965) — Nelson et al. (2008) listed only Populus tremuloides as a host—I choose to consider A. liragus a full species. My view is supported by Hespenheide (2013), an authority on the genus, who stated: “… the official taxonomic standing is that liragus is a ssp. of A. granulatus . I haven’t looked at liragus in a long time, but I think I’d not concur, primarily because they are sympatric in distribution and I follow Mayr’s concept that subspecies must have allopatric distributions. There was a time that ‹host races› were considered subspecies, but that time should be past.”

I have not been able to find in the literature any specific mention of Agrilus liragus occurring in Idaho. However, there are specimens in WFBM from Boundary, Cassia, Latah, and Teton counties determined as Agrilus granulatus liragus by W. F. Barr and R. L. Westcott ( SCAN 2023).