Elachiptera Macquart, 1835

4.2.1 | Genus Elachiptera Macquart, 1835 View in CoL

The most abundant Palearctic species of the genus Elachiptera is E.cornuta . With seven synonyms and varieties, this species represents a species complex briefly

addressed by several authors (see von Tschirnhaus, 2017) but left as unresolved. As expected, three species assigned to E.cornuta (Figure 4H, I, K) were found in the present dataset. The diagnostic features: ocellar triangle not reaching frons apex, scutum shiny with two longitudinal dusted stripes along the dorsocentral lines, and apical scutellar setae close together outlined by Nartshuk and Andersson (2013) are present in all three of the forms identified in this study. Therefore, these morphological features should be disregarded for species recognition within this group. On the other hand, the male morphological features related to the epandrium, distiphallus and femoral organ were very effective to distinguish the varieties of E. cornuta within the Swedish species. Further studies targeting the same morphological features of the synonymized types of E.cornuta should correctly assign E.cornuta varieties within the described types, thus resolving this conundrum of species. The diagnostic features of the identified species of Elachiptera cornuta complex are in Table 1.