Tytthus parviceps ( Reuter, 1890 )

Tytthus parviceps ( Reuter, 1890) View in CoL

Distribution. Circumtropical (both Old and the New world), but not Korea. See details in discussion on Tytthus koreanus Josifov & Kerzhner, 1972 under Tytthus chinensis ( Stål, 1860) and T. parviceps in Henry (2012).

Comments. In Korea, only the single species T. chinensis is known to date from this genus. T. koreanus , known from the Korean Peninsula and the Russian Far East, was synonymized with the former species ( Kerzhner & Josifov 1999, Henry 2012).

Yoon et al. (2012), Cheong (2014, 2015) reported ‘ Tytthus sp. 3 ,’ ‘ Tytthus n. sp. -A,’ and Tytthus parviceps respectively, all apparently based on two female specimens from Namhae-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do province. This identification results were later incorporated to faunal catalogues (KSAE & ESK 2021, NIBR 2019–2023). However, the identification is unstable in which only the dorsal habitus was presented, and ‘diagnosis’ provided by Cheong (2014) is not sufficient to distinguish between T. chinensis and T. parviceps . According to Henry (2012), both species share extremely similar external morphology, and he treated the East Asian materials including Korea as T. chinensis . Cheong (2015) ’s argument is not competent enough to prove the existence of T. parviceps from Korea; we exclude this species from the Korean fauna.