Brahmaea lunulata carpenteri Butler, 1883

Brahmaea lunulata carpenteri Butler, 1883 , stat. n.

Brahmaea carpenteri Butler, 1883 . T.l.: “ Korea, Chosan, Harbour”.

= Brahmaea Lunulata Bremer , var. Tancrei Austaut, 1896 . T.l.: [qu’arrose le fleuve Amour, au sud-est de la Sibérie].

= Brahmaea bicolor Matsumura, 1921 . T.l.: [ Korea].

= Brahmaea magnificentia Bryk, 1949 . T.l.: “ Korea, Shuotsu”.

Distribution: East of the Russian Federation (East Siberia, Amur Region, Primorye), North Korea, South Korea, North China.

The synonymy proposed by Zolotuhin was adopted in a number of fundamental works ( Kitching et al. 2018; Sinev 2019; Paukstadt & Paukstadt 2021b, 2021c, 2021e, 2022).

The following should be noted regarding the system by Zolotuhin. Fabricius (1793) introduced the name certhia as the binomen “ Bombyx certhia ”, but not “ Phalaena certhia ”. The holotypes of the taxa were identified by geographic association of their type localities with the corresponding clades of the COI tree, without morphological identification. Yang (1978) was the first to synonymise Brahmaea porphyria and Brahmaea certhia . Brahmaea lunulata tancrei , Brahmaea bicolor and Brahmaea magnificentia have never been synonymised with Brahmaea carpenteri before, and so their reference in this status should be considered as new synonyms. There are no reasons for the indication of “ Korea ” as the type locality for Brahmaea bicolor . The Beijing area is traditionally considered to be North China rather than East China. The inclusion of East Siberia in the distribution of “ Brahmaea lunulata carpenteri ” is clearly based on mislabelling of the moths (see below).

Thus, Zolotukhin made nomenclatural decisions based on molecular genetic analysis of non-type specimens of taxa and without establishing their morphological accordance either with each other or with the genetically studied samples. Having studied the publications, internet sources and available collections on Brahmaea certhia species group, including the holotype of Saturnia lunulata , we did not agree with Zolotukhin’s conclusion about the impossibility of species determination in this taxonomic group by external characters. Since the molecular COI phylogeny published by Zolotuhin (2016: fig. 4) does not allow associating terminal branches of the tree with specific moths or with the data in Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD) or GenBank (NCBI), we conducted a new genetic study of the group based on the BOLD database.