Agathidium hatchi Wheeler, 1977

Majka, Christopher & Langor, David, 2008, The Leiodidae (Coleoptera) of Atlantic Canada: new records, faunal composition, and zoogeography, ZooKeys 2 (2), pp. 357-402 : 378-379

Agathidium hatchi Wheeler, 1977

Agathidium hatchi was reported by Miller and Wheeler (2005) from a series of female specimens collected in northwestern Oregon and a single male specimen apparently collected in Frederickton (sic), New Brunswick (20.III.1961, R.C. Clark, Utah State University). Miller and Wheeler (2005: 21) wrote, that “The distribution of the species is unusual in that specimens are known from Oregon and New Brunswick, but from nowhere in between. The Oregon specimens (including the type) are females and the New Brunswick specimen is a male. Therefore, there is some possibility the specimens represent different species ...,” and “It is also possible that the New Brunswick specimen is mislabeled.”

The preponderance of evidence indicates that the record from New Brunswick is erroneous and resulted from a mislabeled specimen. Several reasons indicate this:

a) for most of his career R.C. Clark worked on control of balsam wooly adelgid [ Adelges piceae (Ratzeburg) ] and he never conducted research on Coleoptera (W. Varty, pers. comm.);

b) the weather conditions on 20 March, 1961 Fredericton were fully winter-like. Temperatures ranged from -12.8°C (low) to -2.2°C (high) and there was 64 cm of snow on the ground ( National Climate Archive 2007), highly improbable circumstances in which to find a slime mold beetle such as Agathidium ;

c) if R.C. Clark (who worked for the Canadian Forestry Service) had collected any Agathidium specimens incidentally as part of his research, some specimens would have been deposited in the Atlantic Forestry Centre research collection in Fredericton. There are no such specimens in the collection (G. Smith and J. Sweeney, pers. comm.);

d) R.C. Clark lived in Fredericton for over three decades and it is highly unlikely that he would misspell the name of the capital city of New Brunswick as “Frederickton”;

e) in the 1960s there were no scientific exchanges or research programs between Atlantic Forestry Centre and Utah State University (W. Varty, pers. comm.).

Thus, there is no evidence that would indicate that this specimen was actually collected in New Brunswick. Accordingly, we remove this species form the New Brunswick faunal list.