PROC. ENTOMOL. SOC. WASH. 102(3), 2000, pp. 542-548 NOTES ON NEOTROPICAL SPECIES OF TETHINA HALIDAY (DIPTERA: TETHINIDAE) George A. Foster and Wayne N. Mathis Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Insti-tution, Washington, D.C. 20560-0169, U.S.A. (e-mail:
[email protected] and
[email protected]) Abstract. — Neotropical beach-fly species (Diptera: Tethinidae) not included in a pre-vious faunal revision of the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Bermuda are reviewed, including description of the following new species (type locality in parenthesis): Tethina robusta (Chile. Osomo: Puchatrihue). Two new synonyms are also proposed (junior syn-onyms cited first): Rhicnoessa sonorensis Melander = Tethina albula Loew and Tethina setulosa Malloch = Tethina spinulosa Cole. A revised key to the Neotropical species of Tethina and a diagnosis for the senior synonyms are provided. Key Words: Diptera, Tethinidae, Tethina, neotropics Since revising the Tethinidae from the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Bermuda (Foster and Mathis 1998), we have studied additional Neotropical specimens that have revealed a striking new species from Chile and two synonyms of widespread species. This paper reports these discoveries. Here-in, we present a revised key to the Neo-tropical species of Tethina and diagnoses for the species for which synonyms have been discovered. This paper is written with-in the context of our recent revision (Foster and Mathis 1998), and further details are found in that reference. The discovery of the two new synonyms reported herein re-emphasizes our previous observation (Foster and Mathis 1998) that most coastal marine species of Tethinidae have widespread distributions. Although we studied most species of Tethina that were known to occur in the New World for our Caribbean study, we did not examine two species, T. spinulosa Cole and T. sonorensis (Melander), as both were reported to occur only in western North America and our study concerned the Caribbean and adjacent areas. Our study of these two species re-veals that they too are conspecific with oth-er, widespread species as we document be-low. Methods. — The descriptive terminology, with the exceptions noted in Mathis and Munari (1996), follows that of McAlpine (1981). We have followed the terminology for most structures of the male terminalia that other workers in Tethinidae have used (see references in Mathis and Munari 1996). The terminology for structures of the male terminalia is labeled on Figs. 2-4. The description of the new species is based pri-marily on its holotype. States of Mexico are abbreviated as fol-lows: Baja California Norte (BCN), Quin-tana Roo (QNR), Sonora (SON), and Ta-basco (TAB). Key to Neotropical Species of Tethina 1. Gena high, at least 0.5 eye height 7 Gena short, less than 0.5 eye height 2 2. Apex of scutellum with yellowish to reddish
Localities extracted from OCR text.
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