Macromiidae, Needham, 1903

Macromiidae View in CoL as a family

The taxonomic history of the family Macromiidae and its genera is quite complicated and confused. According to the principle of coordination by International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) Art. 36.1 ( International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature 1999), proposal of a family group name in either rank automatically establishes it in all other ranks of the family group. The family group name based on the genus Macromia was first proposed as the subfamily Macromiinae by Needham (1903), who just mentioned this name, for the first time in scientific literature, in the text as follows: “In the Macromiinae , however, it [the antecedent trachea in the larval wing] is formed by a modification of the latter type, as shown for Didymops transversa ” (Needham 1903: 711) . Here the family group name was mentioned as obviously and properly derived from the genus Macromia , which hence was its type genus, and the second genus, Didymops , was explicitly included into that subfamily. At that time both these genera were considered in the family Corduliidae , hence Macromiinae was proposed as belonging to it. Needham apparently intended to propose the new subfamily name in another work of the same year ( Needham & Hart 1903), which contained a taxonomic paragraph in its introduction where families and subfamilies were enumerated. However, another name, Synthemiinae, was used there instead of Macromiinae . In a later work he provided under the subtitle “subfamily MACROMIINAE ” the following footnote “The use of the name Synthemiinae for this subfamily in Bull. 111. State Lab. of Nat. Hist, VI, p. 5, was due to enforced haste in printing, whereby proof corrections made by me were not received by the printer in time for incorporation into the text.” ( Needham 1904: 698).

Until quite recently (see e.g. Bridges 1994) it was erroneously considered that a family group name based on Macromia was first introduced by Tillyard (1917), as the tribe Macromiini of the subfamily Corduliinae including the genera Azuma Needham, 1904 , Didymops , Epophthalmia , Macromia and Phyllomacromia (see his table inserted after page 282). Later Tillyard & Fraser (1940) (this monograph was completed by the second author) proposed another name Epophthalminae Tillyard & Fraser 1940, based on a different genus, for their new subfamily including Epophthalmia , Didymops , Macromia , Macromidia and Phyllomacromia . This subfamily corresponded to the current family Macromiidae with the only exception of the inclusion of Macromidia . The same classification was reproduced in Fraser (1957).

Gloyd (1959) was first to suggest the family rank of Macromiidae , to include Didymops , Epophthalmia , Macromia and, tentatively, Macromidia . The genera Epophthalmia , Didymops , Macromia and Phyllomacromia comprising the family Macromiidae in its current sense (with Macromidia excluded) ( Dijkstra et al. 2013) were shown to form a monophyletic group based on morphological analysis by May (1997) (who still considered them as the subfamily Macromiinae ) and molecular analysis by Ware et al. (2007) (which did not involve Epophthalmia ), Dumont et al. (2010) and Carle et al. (2015).