Atrytonopsis edwardsi W. Barnes & McDunnough, 1916

Atrytonopsis edwardsi W. Barnes & McDunnough, 1916 View in CoL

Lerodea? rupilius Schaus, 1913 (type locality given as “Guapiles” [ Costa Rica] in the original description) was regarded as nomen dubium by Burns (1983), who concluded that its syntype in USNM was “phony”: it differed in some aspects from the original illustration in Schaus (1913) and was labeled from “Guadljara the original description and bears labels in a style typical of all syntypes by Schaus. One of them is the identification label in his handwriting with this species’ name and the word “type.” It is difficult for us to imagine that this specimen is not a true syntype, provided that all other species Schaus proposed based on USNM material have extant syntypes in the collection. However, illustrations of specimens were not known to be particularly accurate, and we hypothesize that there was a mistake in stating the locality of a syntype in the original description: Guadljara was erroneously replaced with Guapiles in the publication (Schaus 1913), maybe because both words start with “Gua”. Therefore, we regard this female “type,” possibly the only specimen Schaus based his description of L. rupilius on, as a true syntype. To stabilize nomenclature, N.V.G. hereby designates this specimen in the USNM collection bearing the following four labels, 3 rd red and others white: [Guadljara | Mex], [ Lerodea ? | rupilius | type Schs], [Type | No. 16817 | U.S. N.M.], [GENITALIA NO. | X-1060 | J. M. Burns 1981] as the lectotype of Lerodea? rupilius Schaus, 1913 .

Morphologically, Burns (1983) identified the lectotype of L. rupilius as Atrytonopsis edwardsi W. Barnes & McDunnough, 1916 (type locality in USA: Arizona, Pima Co.), therefore, L. rupilius is not a junior subjective synonym of Atrytonopsis ovinia zaovinia Dyar, 1913 (type locality in Mexico: Puebla)—currently a junior subjective synonym of Atrytonopsis ovinia (Hewitson, 1866) , (type locality in Nicaragua)—as treated by Evans (1955). Genomic analysis confirms this assessment and places the lectotype as sister to another specimen from Mexico: Jalisco ( Fig. 57), thus also confirming the type locality as Mexico: Jalisco, Guadalajara. The two specimens from Jalisco ( Fig. 57 red) are genetically differentiated from A. edwardsi specimens collected in the USA: Arizona and Texas and Mexico: Sonora ( Fig. 57 blue), forming a separate clade. Due to this genetic differentiation, we propose that L. rupilius is a subspecies of Atrytonopsis edwardsi W. Barnes & McDunnough, 1916 : Atrytonopsis edwardsi rupilius (Schaus, 1913) , comb. nov., stat. nov. Despite a large gap in their distributions, we note that neither COI barcodes nor the whole mitochondrial genomes differentiate these subspecies, and we also see mitochondrial introgression from A. ovinia to A. edwardsi ( Fig. 57b, red and violet within the blue clade).