Heterarthrus fumipennis (Cameron, 1888), species inquirenda

Liston, Andrew, Mutanen, Marko & Viitasaari, Matti, 2019, On the taxonomy of Heterarthrus (Hymenoptera, Tenthredinidae), with a review of the West Palaearctic species, Journal of Hymenoptera Research 72, pp. 83-126 : 96

Heterarthrus fumipennis (Cameron, 1888), species inquirenda

Phyllotoma fumipennis Cameron, 1888: 218. Syntypes assumed, sex not stated. Type locality: England, Norwich ["taken on alder by Mr. J. B. Bridgman"].

Remarks.

It was thought possible that type material might be deposited in the Natural History Museum, London (BMNH), as are most other of Cameron’s sawfly types. Gavin Broad and Sue Ryder kindly looked there for possible type material in the Cameron Collection, but found no specimen or record of such which indicated that syntypes of P. fumipennis were ever deposited there. Tony Irwin informed Liston (electronic mail of 21.04.2008) that no specimen which can be regarded as a type is amongst the sawflies in the Bridgman Collection housed in the Castle Museum, Norwich, and a search by Darren Mann at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where a collection of sawflies bought from Cameron in 1884 is deposited, was also fruitless.

Heterarthrus fumipennis has often been treated as the valid name for a species attached to Acer campestre , with Phyllotoma wuestneii as a junior synonym (e.g. Enslin 1914, Berland 1947, Zirngiebl 1954, Dadurian 1962, Zombori 1982, Zhelochovtsev 1988), but also as a synonym of Heterarthrus aceris (McLachlan, 1867) ( Konow 1905b) or H. aceris (Kaltenbach, 1856) (e.g. Lacourt 1999, Taeger et al. 2010). However, as far as we know, none of these authors examined type material of P. fumipennis , and the original description does not include any characters which will unequivocally identify it. As occurs repeatedly in descriptions of “new” sawfly species by Cameron, his failure to indicate the sex of his type specimen(s) makes interpretation very difficult. The comment that the specimen (or specimens) was collected from alder [ Alnus ] initially tempts one to think that he could have had before him a specimen of H. vagans , but his description of the tegulae as white, and the femora and tibiae extensively dark, contradict this interpretation. The wing colour mentioned by Cameron (1888) was considered by Konow (1905a) and Enslin (1914) to be of value in separating what at that time were presumed to be two European species with similar morphology feeding on maples, but according to present knowledge ( Altenhofer and Zombori 1987), wing colour cannot be used to separate any of the now three species of this group known in the British Isles ( H. cuneifrons , H. fiora , and H. wuestneii ). The apparently completely white tegulae described for H. fumipennis would fit either H. wuestneii or Heterarthrus cuneifrons , but not Heterarthrus fiora . Accordingly, it seems best at present to treat Phyllotoma fumipennis as a species inquirenda.