Helophorus, Fabricius, 1775

Angus, Robert B., Jia, Fenglong, Chen, Zhen-ning, Zhang, Ying, Vondráček, Dominik, Fikáček, Martin & Sw, London, 2016, Taxonomy, larval morphology and cytogenetics of Lihelophorus, the Tibetan endemic subgenus of Helophorus (Coleoptera: Hydrophiloidea), Acta Entomologica Musei Nationalis Pragae 56 (1), pp. 109-148 : 147

Helophorus of the Tibetan Plateau

The subgenus Lihelophorus , treated in detail in this paper, is the only larger clade of Helophorus endemic to the Tibetan Plateau. Apart from it, only two species, both belonging to the subgenus Rhopalohelophorus , are endemic for the region: H. imaensis Orchymont, 1926 and the recently described H. aquila Angus, Jia & Chen, 2014. In addition, H. kozlovi Zaitzev, 1908 occurs exclusively in the Tibetan Plateau and the adjacent Tian Shan Mts., and H. angusi Hebauer, 1999 is so far known only from Nepalese Himalaya on southern margin of the Tibetan Plateau ( ANGUS 1970, 1995; ANGUS et al. 2014; HEBAUER 1999). Although the phylogenetic relationships have not been tested within Helophorus so far, all these species seem to be related to Central Asian species: H. imaensis appears to be closely related to the Mongolian H. kaszabianus Angus, 1970 , H. aquila is a largely parthenogenetic species standing probably close to H. frater Orchymont, 1926 , H. kozlovi shows similarities with the species of the Eastern Palaearctic H. bergrothi species group, and H. angusi seems most similar to H. altaicus Ganglbauer, 1901 . Apart from these endemics, the Tibetan Helophorus fauna includes widespread Eastern Palaearctic or Central Asian species (see Table 4).