Orthelimaea Karny, 1926

Ingrisch, Sigfrid, 2011, New taxa of Elimaeini (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae: Phaneropterinae) from South East Asia, Zootaxa 2935, pp. 1-25 : 9

Orthelimaea Karny, 1926

Typus generis: Elimaea (Orthelimaea) leeuwenii Karny 1926

Elimaea (Orthelimaea) Karny 1926 , Treubia 9: 19, 23

Orthelimaea Gorochov 2009 , Proc. Russ. Entomol. Soc. 80: 112

Diagnosis. The genus is characterised by the straight anterior femur and the possession of a small spine at the anterior coxa ( Karny 1926a).

Discussion. Karny (1926a) designated O. leeuwenii as type when he established Orthelimaea as it was then the only species of this subgenus available to him for study. The genus is distributed from India to Java and Sulawesi. O. leeuwenii remained the only Thai species until Gorochov & Storozhenko (2010) described O. bezborodovi .

Orthelimaea populations known to me from Thailand are all very similar in general shape. The males are characterised by strongly recurved cerci ( Fig. 11 ) with swollen base (cercus proper) and very long rounded or compressed prolongation that may be regarded as the strongly modified apical spine when compared with the cerci of the Indian species of the genus that have much shorter apical modifications (e.g. figs. 18–22 in Ingrisch 1990). This theory is supported by the fact that only the swollen base of the cerci is hairy as typical for cerci in tettigoniids, while the remaining larger area is smooth. The females have a short, sabre-shaped ovipositor, which also occurs in O. securigera (Brunner, 1878) while O. insignis (Walker, 1869) has a sickle-shaped ovipositor.

In a former publication ( Ingrisch 1998) I gave a short redescription of O. leeuwenii . By that time I had only males from Kanchanaburi province available; other distribution records were based on females. Although I had shortly seen Karnys' specimens of O. leeuwenii before, I overlooked the delicate differences to my specimens. After males from another area became available, it proved that they show some distinct differences in the abdominal terminalia, concealed copulatory structures and the stridulatory file. Moreover, a recent re-examination of one of Karnys' type specimens (in RMNH) showed that none of both male populations fully agrees with that type. Below is a short redescription of O. leeuwenii and the description of two new species. Although Orthelimaea is widespread in Central and Northern Thailand ( Ingrisch 1998), we have to wait until males become available to get an idea of the distribution of the different species concerned.

Figures

FIGURE 11. Male abdominal apex in lateral view (A, D); same in dorsal view (B, E); male cercus (C, F); apical area of cercus (G). A – C, Orthelimaea kanburi sp. n. paratypes; D – F, O. volsella sp. n. [D – E, holotype; F, paratype]; G, O. leeuwenii (Karny, 1926) syntype in RMNH. Abbreviations: 10 t, tenth abdominal tergite; c, cercus; e, epiproct.