Philopterus communis Nitzsch, 1818

Palma, Ricardo L. & Peck, Stewart B., 2013, <strong> An annotated checklist of parasitic lice (Insecta: Phthiraptera) from the Galápagos Islands </ strong>, Zootaxa 3627 (1), pp. 1-87 : 68

Philopterus communis Nitzsch, 1818

Kellogg & Kuwana (1902: 464) reported “ Docophorus communis Nitzsch ” based on their identification of one male and one female from two species of Geospiza from the Galápagos Islands. From the Kellogg Collection, we examined the female, which is not Philopterus citrinellae (Schrank, 1776) , the senior synonym of Philopterus communis Nitzsch, 1818 (see Palma & Price 2006: 2). In addition, we examined a third louse, another female Philopterus from the Kellogg Collection, also identified as “ Docophorus communis Nitzsch ” by Kellogg, but not reported in his papers because the host and locality are “ Guadalupe House finch, Guadalupe Id”; this female is identical to the female reported from Geospiza . In their way to the Galápagos Islands, the Hopkins Stanford Galapagos Expedition visited Guadalupe Island where birds and lice were collected, but these records were not included in any publication ( Palma 1994b: 269). One of those birds was a Guadalupe house finch ( Carpodacus mexicanus amplus Ridgway, 1876 ) collected on 5 November 1898, and now kept as a preserved specimen in the collection of the California Academy of Sciences under the registration number CAS 83083/85. It is most likely that this bird was the host of all three Philopterus lice mentioned above. Therefore, we delete the species Philopterus communis Nitzsch, 1818 —also listed by Clay (in Linsley & Usinger 1966: 131)—from the louse fauna of the Galápagos Islands. Thompson (1939: 72) listed “ Philopterus subflavescens (Geoffroy) ” “Galapagos Is.” as a senior synonym of Docophorus communis Nitzsch , but Hopkins & Clay (1952: 288) regarded “ subflavescens ... Geoffroy” as “not a name but a descriptive phrase”.