Scirtes haemisphaericus

Watts, Chris H. S., Cooper, Steven J. B. & Saint, Kathleen M., 2017, Review of Australian Scirtes Illiger, Ora Clark and Exochomoscirtes Pic (Coleoptera: Scirtidae) including descriptions of new species, new groups and a multi-gene molecular phylogeny of Australian and non-Australian species, Zootaxa 4347 (3), pp. 511-532 : 519

Scirtes haemisphaericus species group ( Yoshitomi 2005)

Yoshitomi (2005) defined this group as having the “body oval, parameres simple, penis symmetrical with a long slender pala (basal piece)”. We add: mandibles blunt, first segment of labial palpus shorter than second segment, caudal margin of metacoxal plates weakly concave, metatrochanters elongate (about 2.5× as long as wide), caudal margin of sternite 7 deeply concave; females with relatively short coxites and broad short styles and a moderately sized, compact, well sclerotized prehensor and bursal sclerite ( Fig. 10 ; Yoshitomi 2005); larvae with a pronounced spindle-shape with multidentate mandibles, maxillary palpus three-segmented, anal palpi>5 ( Klausnitzer 2009; Watts 2014).

Both the sequence data and adult and larval morphology support a relationship of the single Australian species, S. auratus , with the European S. haemisphaericus , the type species of the genus Scirtes . The Japanese S. sobrinus Lewis clearly also belongs in this group on larval characters, prehensor and bursal sclerite although less clearly on the male genitalia ( Yoshitomi 2005). The sequence data also placed two closely related species from Vietnam, each represented by a single male, in this grouping ( Fig. 1 ). The male genitalia of both are similar and closely resemble the illustration of the male genitalia of S. sobrinus in Yoshitomi (2005) .

Figures

FIGURE 1. Phylogenetic tree of Australian Scirtes, Ora, Exochomoscirtes and some related Asian species, based on Bayesian inference (BI) analysis of concatenated sequence data of COI, EF 1 - a and TOP 1. A tree with identical topology was obtained using ML analyses of the same data set and a concatenated dataset comprising only COI and TOP 1. Numbers on branches give posterior probabilities (left) from BI analyses and bootstrap proportions (right) as a percentage of 500 pseudoreplicates from a ML analysis.

FIGURES 6 – 10. Prehensor and bursal sclerite of: 6) Scirtes albamaculatus; 7) S. exoletus; 8) S. nigerpalpus; 9) S. orientalis; 10) S. zwicki.