Boletina joosti Plassmann, 1987

Kolcsár, Levente-Péter & Salmela, Jukka, 2017, New taxonomic and faunistic records of fungus gnats (Insecta, Diptera) from Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia, Check List 13 (5), pp. 533-559 : 541

Boletina joosti Plassmann, 1987

Material examined. Figure 1. Romania: Gura Haitii, Călimani Mt., spruce forest near to mine, 1640 m a.s.l., 47.1071° N, 025.2385° E, 21 August 2014, 1 male, DIPT- JS-2016-0240.

This is a rare European species, hitherto known only from Germany. Plassmann (1986) described this species based on a holotype and a paratype males collected from Thuringia and Bavaria, respectively. The male specimens studied by Plassmann were collected in late April and late June. Instead, the specimen from Romania was collected in late August, and thus, B. joosti is on the wing during early and late season and adults probably overwinter. The closely related B. trivittata ( Meigen, 1818) has a similar phenology pattern in Fennoscandia (J. Salmela, pers. obs.). Immature stages of B. joosti are unknown, but B. trivittata has been reared from rotting wood and soil litter; Boletina larvae are seldom found from fungal fruiting bodies (see Salmela et al. 2016 for a review). Boletina joosti is probably a very rare species, perhaps having a restricted and fragmented Central European range in mountainous areas.

The genus Boletina is still relatively poorly known. Phylogeny and natural classification of the genus are still unresolved ( Martinsson et al. 2011), and new species are regularly found, especially from the boreal zone ( Salmela et al. 2016). However, in a phylogenetic assessment based on molecular characters, the Boletina trivittata- group (consisting of B. trivittata and B. subtrivittata Zaitzev, 1994 ) formed a monophyletic clade ( Martinsson et al. 2011). This trivittata - group is perhaps a sister group to all other recent Boletina , and Katatopygia Martinsson and Kjaerandsen, 2012 is a basal sister group to the trivittata- group + remaining Boletina ( Martinsson et al. 2011) . The trivittata -group consists of 3 Nearctic species ( B. gracilis Johannsen, 1912 , B. nacta Johannsen, 1912 , B. sedula Johannsen, 1912 ) and 4 Palaearctic species ( B. augusta Chandler & Blasco-Zumeta, 2001 , B. joosti , B. trivittata , B. subtrivittata ). Of the latter, B. subtrivittata is known from the Russian Far East and Hokkaido, Japan ( Sasakawa and Kimura 1974), as B. trivittata, ( Zaitzev 1994) , while 3 species occur in Europe ( Chandler and Blasco-Zumeta 2001).