Tomares ballus, AND

Krupitsky, Anatoly V, Shapoval, Nazar A, Schepetov, Dmitry M, Ekimova, Irina A & Lukhtanov, Vladimir A, 2022, Phylogeny, species delimitation and biogeography of the endemic Palaearctic tribe Tomarini (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae), Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 196 (2), pp. 630-646 : 639

PHYLOGENY AND SYSTEMATICS OF T. BALLUS AND

T. MAURITANICUS

Within the T. ballus clade, three samples of T. ballus from Tunisia and one from Morocco showing a basal polytomy are detected. Their taxonomic status will remain unclear until specimens of probably extinct populations of T. ballus from north-east Africa and the Near East are analysed. They were widely known in the literature as subspecies T. ballus cyrenaica Turati, 1924 (type locality: Benghazi, Lybia), but Tshikolovets (2011) has pointed out that the name T. ballus mareoticus Graves, 1918 (type locality: Alexandria, Egypt) has priority over T. b. cyrenaica and should be attributed to disjoined populations previously known from southern Tunisia, Lybia, Egypt and Israel. Other specimens from Morocco, Algeria and Spain demonstrate no genetic differentiation and obviously represent the nominotypical subspecies.

Two units from Morocco are detected within the T. mauritanicus clade. They correspond to the subspecies T. mauritanicus antonius Brevignon, 1985 from the Middle Atlas Mountains and the subspecies T. mauritanicus amelnorum Tarrier, 1997 from the Anti-Atlas Mountains. One haplotype from Morocco recovered in two species delimitation analyses as a candidate species needs further exploration; probably, it represents an undescribed taxon.