Scirtes brisbanensis Pic, 1956

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 : 526

Scirtes brisbanensis Pic, 1956 / Scirtes triangularis Watts, 2004

Notes. In Cooper et al. (2014) it was noted that two closely related taxa, each represented by a single female and both identified as Scirtes brisbanensis , were present at Mt Molloy in North Queensland. With access to additional specimens, including males, the present study shows that one specimen was S. brisbanensis and the other S. triangularis ( Fig. 1 ).

Larva. A single larva of S. triangularis is now known, identified by DNA sequencing. In the key to the larvae of Australian Scirtes in Watts (2014) it runs to the S. helmsi / S. orientalis couplet. However, it is smaller than S. helmsi (head width 0.9 mm vs 1.2 mm) and with fewer setae on tergite 1 (8 vs 30–40). From the similar sized S. orientalis it differs in having a more uneven row of palisade setae on the clypeolabrum ( Fig. 28 ) and eight rather than nine claw teeth but is otherwise very similar.

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 23 – 28. 23) Male terminalia of Scirtes zwicki: a) tergite 8, b) tergite 9, c) sternite 9, d) trigonium, e) tegmen. 24) Habitus photograph of Scirtes zwicki; 25) ditto, ♀ S. albamaculatus. 26) Clypeolabrum of last instar larva of S. lynnae; 27) ditto, S. serratus; 28) ditto, S. triangularis.