Perla pallida Guérin-Méneville, 1843

Murányi, Dávid, Manko, Peter, Kovács, Tibor, Vinçon, Gilles, Žiak, Matej, Kerimova, Ilhama G., Snegovaya, Nataly Yurievna & Oboňa, Jozef, 2021, Review and contribution to the stonefly (Insecta: Plecoptera) fauna of Azerbaijan, Zootaxa 4975 (1), pp. 58-80 : 62

Perla pallida Guérin-Méneville, 1843

The species was described without exact locality, mentioned only as ’Caucasus’ ( Guérin-Méneville 1843). Walker (1851) found its types in the Natural History Museum, London (NHM), though they were lacking from the latest catalog ( Kimmins 1970) and, presumably lost during the 19th century. Klapálek (1923) redescribed the species on the basis of specimens from Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. Though some question the conspecificity of these specimens, they have become de facto neotypes on which the present concept of the species is based (e.g., Sivec & Stark 2002). Klapálek’s Azerbaijan specimen was a male collected in Gəncə (Gəncə-Qazax region, original labels: Elisabethop; Kolenati; caucasica / det. Kempny; pallida / Klapálek) and still exists in the Natural History Museum of Wien (NHMW). One of us (DM) studied and compared Klapálek’s specimens with our recent specimens from Georgia. Besides the NHMW specimen from the 19th century, Kasymov (1972) reported the species from several sites in Gəncə-Qazax (Dəstəfur), Kəlbəcər-Laçın (Kəlbəcər, Tərtərçay River), Lənkəran (Sahgadzhi), Şəki-Zaqatala (Katexçay River) and Yuxarı-Qarabağ regions (Şuşa, Xankəndi). Sivec & Stark (2002) considered P. pallida to be a species complex that is distributed in the Caucasus, Anatolia, the Balkans and the Carpathians.