Anisops sardeus sardeus Herrich-Schäffer, 1849

Cianferoni, Fabio & Dia, Aref, 2025, Annotated catalogue and checklist of Gerromorpha, Nepomorpha, and Leptopodomorpha (Hemiptera: Heteroptera) of Lebanon, with new records, Zootaxa 5725 (1), pp. 1-54 : 29-30

Anisops sardeus sardeus Herrich-Schäffer, 1849

Anisops ( sardea ?): Dia (1998), “Litani basin […] Sources latérales, Yelouch”.

Anisops sardeus sardeus Herrich-Schäffer : Ghahari et al. (2023b: 5), “ Lebanon ”, quotation of previous unspecified records.

Material examined. Survey material: Basin of Litani: Nabaa el Hjaïr, 6.IX.2005, 1 ♀, MLUB .

General distribution. It is a widespread species, occurring from the Afrotropical region to the Mediterranean Basin, and reaching India and Myanmar eastwards ( Cianferoni & Cianfanelli 2015).

Remarks. A female specimen was studied and identified as A. sardeus (see Nieser 1996 and Cianferoni 2019). Beyond the features included in the previous references, as suggested also by N. Nieser (pers. comm., 3 April 2019), females of A. sardeus can be separated from the other species occurring in the Mediterranean area also by the vertex slightly protruding if examined in dorsal view. However, this character must be used in comparison with the other species and identifications should be confirmed also with the aid of the other features already mentioned. Concerning the ovipositor valves used as character in Cianferoni (2019), general size and ratios seem quite constant within species, but also in this case it cannot be used absolutely for separating taxa, but only between species in which these measures do not overlap. Conversely, a large degree of variability in the development of lateral teeth ( cf. Cianferoni 2019) exist within species; thus, the latter feature must be discarded for identification.

A further specimen collected by the second author on 29.I.1989 at Yelouch (Basin of Litani) was identified by Alain Thiéry (University of Avignon, France) as Anisops sp. and reported by Dia (1998) as “ Anisops ( sardea ?) ”. Unfortunately, after repeated attempts it was not possible to examine the specimen.

The country occurrence for Lebanon listed by Ghahari et al. (2023b) seems apparently unsupported by published records (see e.g., Brooks 1951; Nieser & Moubayed 1986; Aukema 2024).

Therefore, this new record is a confirmation of the previous data.

The subspecies A. sardeus madagascariensis Poisson, 1937 is known from Madagascar, and the use of the nominotypical subspecies is required for the rest of the range of A. sardeus .