Culex (Culex) weschei Edwards, 1941

Harbach, Ralph E. & Wilkerson, Richard C., 2023, The insupportable validity of mosquito subspecies (Diptera: Culicidae) and their exclusion from culicid classification, Zootaxa 5303 (1), pp. 1-184 : 94

Culex (Culex) weschei Edwards

subspecies gediensis Edwards, 1941 —original combination: Culex (Culex) weschei ssp. gediensis . Distribution: Coastal Kenya ( Edwards 1941; van Someren et al. 1955).

subspecies weschei Edwards, 1935 —original combination: Culex weschei . Distribution: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, Sudan, Togo ( Wilkerson et al. 2021), Zimbabwe ( Jupp 1996).

As is the case of most species of Culex in the Afrotropical Region, knowledge of the morphology and bionomics of Cx. weschei is very scanty. The adult female and male and the fourth-instar larva of the type form are known but they have not been studied in detail. The original description was based on the scaling of the legs and abdomen of adults that distinguished them from the adults of Cx. guiarti Blanchard, 1905 . Subspecies gediensis was described as a form that resembles the type form “closely in colouring and in structure of the ♂ terminalia [genitalia], but differs as follows: antenna of ♀ with only 10 instead of 15 hairs [setae] in each whorl; propleura [antepronota] in both sexes with fewer setae (about 10 in ♂ and about 6 in ♀ instead of about 20 and 15 respectively); sternopleura [mesokatepisterna] with fewer scales” ( Edwards 1941). The mesokatepisternal scales are numerous in the type form, with the upper and lower patches nearly joined ( Edwards 1941). The larva of gediensis is unknown. It is interesting to note that the larva of the type form illustrated as “ Culex sp. ?” by Macfie & Ingram (1916) was recognized as the larva of Cx. weschei by Edwards (1941), but it was not described until Hopkins (1952) included it, along with the illustrations of Macfie & Ingram, in his treatise on the larvae of the Mosquitoes of the Ethiopian Region.

The type form was originally described from Ghana (as Gold Coast) and has been recorded from a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Subspecies gediensis was originally described ( Edwards 1935) and subsequently recorded ( van Someren et al. 1955) from the coastal fringe of Kenya. It has not been found elsewhere and the type form has not been recorded from inland areas of Kenya, and except for South Sudan to the northwest, it has not been recorded from the adjoining countries of Ethiopia (north), Somalia (northeast), Tanzania (south) and Uganda (west). In view of its apparent allopatric coastal distribution and the exceptional differences in the vestiture of the antenna, antepronotum and mesokatepisternum compared to the type form, we conclude that gediensis is probably a distinct species and therefore formally afford it specific status: Culex (Culex) gediensis Edwards, 1941 . Culex gediensis is currently listed as a species in the Encyclopedia of Life.