Catops pruinosus Schweiger, 1956

Schilthuizen, Menno, Perreau, Michel & Njunjic, Iva, 2018, A review of the Cholevinae from the island of Borneo (Coleoptera, Leiodidae), ZooKeys 777, pp. 57-108 : 60-63

Catops pruinosus Schweiger, 1956 Figure 2

Catops pruinosus Schweiger, 1956: 538, fig. 5; type from Kuatun, Fukien, China.

Catops solitarius Szymczakowski, 1961: 129, figs 16-19; type from Sandakan, Sabah, Borneo (in NHMUK).

Material.

Sabah. Sandakan (leg. W.B. Pryer, NHMUK 1925-264). Holotype of C. solitarius Szymczakowski (examination based on a photograph taken by Jan Růžička).

Description.

Length: 3.9 mm. Habitus slender and elongated, somewhat flattened. Body reddish brown; head, centre of the pronotum, and centre of the elytra dark brown. Entire dorsum covered in orange setae. Antenna robust, 7th antennomere as wide as long, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th wider than long. Pronotum 1.54 times as wide as long, frontal and caudal margins straight, lateral margins curved, more strongly rostrad than caudad (greatest width of the pronotum slightly behind the centre), caudal angles broadly rounded; surface with dense, rasp-like punctuation and somewhat matte due to microsculpture. Elytra with fine punctuation, shagreened, and with slight indications of longitudinal striae, 1.27 times as wide as the pronotum, 1.3 times as long as jointly wide (length measured from the caudal tip of the scutellum to the apex of the elytra). Male unknown.

Habitat and distribution.

Catops pruinosus is known from a large latitudinal expanse along the East Asian coast: Shanghai, Fujian, and North Borneo. The only known record from Borneo (Sabah: Sandakan) is the female holotype of C. solitarius , later synonymized with C. pruinosus ( Szymczakowski 1964).

Remarks.

Catops pruinosus is a member of the C. hilleri group ( Szymczakowski 1964), represented by ca. 30 species, primarily from central and eastern Asia ( Perreau 2000). The diagnosis above is based on a photograph (Figure 2) of the holotype of C. solitarius , as well as the description of C. solitarius by Szymczakowksi (1961). In the absence of males, we are unsure whether the Borneo specimen is indeed conspecific with C. pruinosus . Indeed, we also doubt that the specimen truly derives from Borneo: despite many years of work in Borneo, we have never come across any Cholevini . If members of such temperate-region groups exist in Borneo, we would expect them to occur in the highlands, rather than in coastal locations such as Sandakan. In fact, it is not impossible that the Sandakan specimen is a mislabelled Chinese specimen, as the collector, William Burgess Pryer, was active in Shanghai (where C. pruinosus is known to occur) immediately before moving to Sandakan ( Tregonning 1954).