Apatetris Staudinger, 1879

Junnilainen, Jari & Nupponen, Kari, 2010, The gelechiid fauna of the southern Ural Mountains, part I: descriptions of seventeen new species (Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae), Zootaxa 2366, pp. 1-34 : 4

The Apatetris Staudinger, 1879 genus group

Because of a lack of a generic revision of the tribe Apatetrini ( Ponomarenko 2006), Palaearctic taxa belonging to the Apatetris genus group have been listed under Apatetris Staudinger during the last decades. The species currently placed in Apatetris are rather diverse compared with other genera of Gelechiidae . This situation was unsatisfying, and some species were placed in already described genera, e.g. Coloptilia conchylidella Fletcher, 1940 ( Karsholt & Riedl 1996) and Catatinagma trivittellum Rebel, 1903 ( Karsholt 2004) .

The main problem for resolving this taxonomic issue is that the type species of the genus Apatetris , A. mirabella Staudinger, 1880 , is only known from the female holotype, and the male genitalia are important for the systematics within the Gelechiidae . It is a rather large species with well-marked forewings; in the female genitalia there is no signum. It is re-described in detail by Janse (1951).

We found three species belonging to the Apatetris genus group in the southern Urals. The females of all of these have paired signa in the corpus bursae, and none of them appears to be congeneric with Apatetris . We consider one of these species to belong to Dactylotula and two to Catatinagma (see below for more details).

In the list of European Gelechiidae ( Karsholt & Riedl 1996) four species are included in the genus Apatetris : A. altithermella (Walsingham, 1903) , A. kinkerella (Snellen, 1876) , A. trivittellum (Rebel, 1903) and A. agenjoi Gozmány, 1954 . The first two species fit in well with the characteristics of Dactylotula . A. trivittellum (Rebel, 1903) is transferred back to its original genus Catatinagma (see below and Junnilainen et al. (2010)).

A. agenjoi is omitted in this context because it is known only from Spain and does not coincide well with any of the genera treated here.