Rhygoplitis sanctivincenti (Ashmead, 1900) Ashmead, 1900

Fernandez-Triana, Jose L., Whitfield, James B., Rodriguez, Josephine J., Smith, M. Alex, Janzen, Daniel H., Hallwachs, Winnie D., Hajibabaei, Mehrdad, Burns, John M., Solis, M. Alma, Brown, John, Cardinal, Sophie, Goulet, Henri & Hebert, Paul D. N., 2014, Review of Apantelessensu stricto (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Microgastrinae) from Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, northwestern Costa Rica, with keys to all described species from Mesoamerica, ZooKeys 383, pp. 1-565 : 13

5. Rhygoplitis sanctivincenti (Ashmead, 1900) comb. n.

Apanteles sanctivincenti Ashmead, 1900: 279. (Saint Vincent).

Remarks.

The species Apanteles sanctivincenti Ashmead, 1900 was described from a single male, but the type has never been found in the BMNH and is probably lost (Gavin Broad, personal communication). Thus, later researchers reviewing the genus ( Muesebeck 1921, Nixon 1965) or cataloguing it ( Szépligeti 1904, Shenefelt 1972) were unable to study it, and could only rely upon the very poor original description and key from Ashmead (1900: 279-280). Those five papers are the only publications citing the name Apanteles sanctivincenti Ashmead, and the species has been considered as belonging to Apanteles since its original description. However, after Mason’s (1981) paper splitting Apanteles into several genera, it is evident that Apanteles sanctivincenti Ashmead belongs to a different genus, based on its pronotum with a median longitudinal carina, a character that immediately excludes it from the current limits of Apanteles , but that occurs in several other genera of Microgastrinae . In his paper revising the fauna of the Caribbean islands of St. Vincent and Grenada, Ashmead (1900) treated five other genera of microgastrines: Microplitis , Protapanteles , Protomicroplitis , Urogaster and Pseudapanteles . The first three belong to completely different groups which can safely be excluded from the present analysis. Urogaster is no longer a valid genus (the majority of its species have been transferred to Apanteles ). Pseudapanteles can also be excluded because its species have a median longitudinal groove on the first mediotergite, a trait not present in Apanteles sanctivincenti Ashmead, according to the original description. After carefully considering the distribution of other genera in the region, and comparing it with other species descriptions from the same paper ( Ashmead 1900), we believe that the best generic placement for this species is Rhygoplitis .

It is worth mentioning that Ashmead (1900: 291) described two other species, Urogaster aciculatus and Pseudapanteles sancti-vincentis , which are now considered to be the same and to belong to Rhygoplitis ; the valid species name currently is Rhygoplitis aciculatus . It is possible that Apanteles sanctivincenti is yet another name for that same species, meaning that three different names in three different genera were applied to the same species by the same author in the same paper! This case is not unlikely, due to Ashmead’s poor knowledge of the Microgastrinae ( Mason 1981). In fact, the descriptions in his 1900 paper are not only very inconsistent (characters in the key do not correspond well to the descriptions, descriptions are not homogeneous, some body areas are named differently in the same paper, e.g., knees and femur) but they are also misleading, e.g., the original description of Urogaster aciculatus mentions the propodeum with a large, round areola, when it actually has no areola at all. We studied the three descriptions in detail to see if they could correspond to the same species. The lack of uniformity and different terminology prevents a certain conclusion, but they are similar in many regards, differing in minor details such as coloration (which may be meaningless anyway, because of the very small number of specimens examined by the author). Because the holotype of Apanteles sanctivincenti is lost, this situation may never be resolved unambiguously. Thus for the sake of name stability, and pending future studies on the genus, we just transfer Apanteles sanctivincenti to Rhygoplitis .