Clerus mutillarius mutillarius Fabricius, 1775

Colonnelli, Enzo & Nardi, Gianluca, 2019, The Cleridae, Anthribidae and Curculionidae (Coleoptera) described by Ponza, Zootaxa 4590 (1), pp. 196-199 : 197

Clerus mutillarius mutillarius Fabricius, 1775

Clerus mutillarius Fabricius, 1775: 157

Attelabus funereus Ponza, 1805: 66 , pl. 1, Lin. 4[.2]

Ghiliani (1887: 300) considered A. funereus Ponza as a synonym of C. mutillarius . The synonymy was listed also by Luigioni (1929: 636), as Pseudoclerops mutillarius Fabricius = funereus Ponza , but was mostly overlooked otherwise. Dutto et al. (2009: 428) quoted that two anonymous hand-written notes in French on a copy of Ponza’s (1805) paper, conserved in the library of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale “G. Doria” (Genova), refer this name to C. mutillarius . Original description and illustration confirm the synonymy with the nominal subspecies. No specimens of A. funereus were found in the rich Massimiliano Spinola collection (cf. Ekis 1975; Giachino 1982), in spite of Spinola—"the superb cleridologist of his time" ( Ekis 1975: 2)—was active in the same region where Ponza lived (Conci & Poggi 1996).

Clerus mutillarius mutillarius is widespread across all of Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia) ( Cornacchia 2011) but, from a conservation point of view, is classified as “Near Threatened” ( Audisio et al. 2015).