Cyphopterum retusum ( Walker, 1851 )

Aguin-Pombo, Dora & Freitas, Carlos, 2008, An annotated check list of the Cicadomorpha and Fulgoromorpha (Hemiptera) of the Madeira and Salvages archipelagos, Zootaxa 1762, pp. 1-28 : 24

Cyphopterum retusum ( Walker, 1851)

Issus retusus Walker, 1851: 371

Cyphopterum retusum ; Melichar, 1905: 477; China, 1938: 54; Leise, 1992: 260; Lindberg, 1961: 57

Cyphopterum obtusatum ; Leise, 1992: 9

Distribution. Endemic to Madeira archipelago. MADEIRA: reported from several localities in northern and southern slopes at different altitudes ( China, 1938; Leise, 1992; Lindberg, 1961; Walker, 1851 as Issus retusus ; Melichar, 1905).

Habitat and/or host plant. Apparently polyphagous and common in hedges, in many cases on Rubus ( Lindberg, 1961) but present also in many types of habitats and vegetation including pine forest with Faya , Acacia , coastal vegetation Rubus and Artemisia , herbaceous vegetation with Pterys and Rubus , moist hillsides with Salix , Ulex and Rubus ( Leise, 1992) .

Remarks. This species was misidentified by several authors and erroneously reported from several localities. From mainland Portugal (Leiria) it was erroneously reported by Lallemand (1929a and 1929b) and Seabra (1930a, 1930b, 1939a, 1939b, 1941) based on an incorrect identification of C. adscendens (H.-S.) (see Leise, 1992). Another erroneous record seems to be "Port Philip", the type locality of C. curvipenne Walker 1958 . Distant (1910) considered this species a synonym of C. retusum although he apparently did not examine the type material. The locality Port Philip is unknown to Madeira but known to Australia (Victoria) where this genus is absent. The Australian locality may have been wrongly assigned by Captain Parry, the donor of the specimen, who may have travelled from Madeira to Australia. This species seems also to have been misidentified as C. obtusatum Melichar, 1923 ; the description of this last species was based on a single female specimen from Cape Verde ( Melichar, 1923), the only material of this species known. Leise (1922) after examining C. obtusatum could not find any differences in head or body shape from C. retusum ( Leise, 1992) . For Cape Verde seven endemic species of Cyphopterum were reported and all except C. obtusatum belong to a different subgenus, Phocypterum. Therefore, Leise (1992) suggested that this specimen was mislabelled and that this was the same species recorded from Madeira because it seems unlikely that a species of Cyphopterum s. str. occurs in Cape Verde. Additional support for this is the fact that this species has never been collected in further sampling by Lindberg who collected intensively on this archipelago.