Petalocladius setosus Sublette & Wirth, 1972

Andersen, Trond, Höcherl, Amelie, Sanz-laParra, Annui Malla, Bastardo, Ruth H. & Baranov, Viktor, 2024, A New Species Of Petalocladius Sublette & Wirth, 1972 (Diptera, Chironomidae, Orthocladiinae) From The Dominican Republic, With An Emended Generic Diagnosis, CHIRONOMUS Journal of Chironomidae Research 2024 (38), pp. 4-13 : 8

Petalocladius setosus Sublette & Wirth, 1972

The male and female of P. setosus were described in detail by Sublette and Wirth (1972: 2). However, the species is rather sparsely figured by Sublette and Wirth (1972: figs 1-3). David Pecor has therefore kindly sent us photos of the head, thorax, wing and hypopygium of the male ( Figs 5 A-F).

Systematics

Phylogenetic analysis using Bayesian inference led to Petalocladius being a sister group to the clade Thalassosmittia + Mesosmittia + Pseudosmittia + Eretmoptera , with a weak support of 0.16 ( Fig. 6 ), common for morphology-only reconstructions, where some taxa are having many missing character states. In the RougePlot reconstruction, Petalocladius was recovered in>30% of trees next to Abiskomyia ( Fig. 7 ).

Figures

Figure 6. Position of Petalocladius (marked in red) in the phylogenetic tree of Orthocladiinae, reconstructed with Bayesian inference (all posterior probabilities of the nodes are displayed, regardless of the value). This is a majority rule consensus tree based on morphology only.

Figure 7. Rouge plot of the frequency of placement of Petalocladius on a Bayesian tree from Fig. 6, based on the frequency of occurrence of Petalocladius in a given node, based on 50001 most congruent trees from the Bayesian analysis of the genus’s morphology.