Plangia villiersi Chopard, 1954

Massa, Bruno, 2021, Orthoptera Tettigoniidae as indicators of biodiversity hotspots in the Guinean Forests of Central and West Tropical Africa, Zootaxa 4974 (3), pp. 401-458 : 429

Plangia villiersi Chopard, 1954

Material examined. Côte d’Ivoire, Mt. Tonkoui (1171m) 12-16.III.2017 ( UV), P. Moretto (2♀) ; Côte d’Ivoire, Taï National Park , Res. Station, 27.III-4.IV.2017 ( UV), P. Moretto (1♀) ; Gabon, Lope National Park , 13-14.III.2013, N. Moulin (1♀) .

Measurements (mm). Females (in parenthesis after Chopard 1954). Body length: 17.4-20.9 (20.5); pronotum length: 5.1-5.2 (5.5); length hind femur: 12.0-13.5 (17.0); tegmina: 27.6-29.0 (32.0); tegmina width: 10.6-11.0 (11.6); ovipositor: 7.5-7.6 (5.0).

Distribution. Plangia villiersi was described on the female sex from Mt. Nimba and Nion ( Guinea) by Chopard (1954), who wrote that it is very similar to P. karschi , and differs mainly in the shape of tegmina, which are larger and more oval (length/width tegmina: 2.7). Specimens above listed from Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon have tegmina fairly oval, with the ratio length/width tegmina: 2.6; only Plangia ovalifolia (Bolívar, 1912) from Seychelles (Indian Ocean), described on the male sex, has such oval tegmina (length/width tegmina: 2.9). Thus, in the absence of males of P. villiersi , it is impossible to establish if P. ovalifolia and P. villiersi are conspecific, even if it seems unlikely that P. villiersi from West Africa and P. ovalifolia from Seychelles, remote islands about 7,000 km away from West Africa, belong to the same taxon.