Nanocladius Kieffer, 1913

Namayandeh, Armin, Hudson, Patrick L., Bogan, Daniel L. & Hudson, John P., 2024, Chironomidae (Diptera: Insecta) of Alaska, USA, with descriptions of new species and a checklist, Zootaxa 5511 (1), pp. 1-95 : 64

Nanocladius Kieffer, 1913

All of the Alaskan records of species in the genus Nanocladius are larval forms except for an adult male of Nanocladius (s.s.) balticus (Palmén, 1959) we collected in a drift sample from Sixmile Creek in the Anchorage area and several males of Nanocladius (s.s.) dichromus (Kieffer, 1906) from the Tangle River. These collections are new faunistic records for Alaska. Identifying larval specimens to species is difficult and can be suspect, but identifying species groups is fairly straightforward (Andersen et al. 2013). We found a record of a larva collected from an unnamed lake in the Arctic Coastal Plain, identified as Nanocladius dichromus group. We found larvae of Nanocladius parvulus group in several streams in Southwest Alaska, including Victoria Creek and the Little Mulchatna River. We collected Nanocladius spiniplenus Saether, 1977 larvae in Cottonwood Creek in Wasilla and Chester Creek in Anchorage. This is a new record for Alaska. We collected two Nanocladius (s.s.) sp. larvae from Harriet Hunt Lake in Ketchikan and the Yukon River. At least one other species is present in Alaska within the subgenus Plecopteracoluthus Steffan, 1965 . We have collected larvae of this subgenus from Lily Lake near Haines, and Sikes et al. (2016) reported specimens from St. Matthew Island. Larvae in this subgenus are symphoretic or parasitic on several families of immature aquatic insects ( Saether 1977b).