Lasionycta phaea (Hampson, 1905)

Crabo, Lars & Lafontaine, Donald, 2009, A Revision of Lasionycta Aurivillius (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) for North America and notes on Eurasian species, with descriptions of 17 new species, 6 new subspecies, a new genus, and two new species of Tricholita Grote, ZooKeys 30 (30), pp. 1-156 : 15-16

Lasionycta phaea species-group

The male genitalia of the L. phaea species-group resemble those of the L. skraelingia speciesgroup, but the uncus is broadly flattened and spatulate with a squared-off apex and the digitus is longer, extending below the valve. Females have a distinctly different bursa than those of the L. skraelingia species-group. Th e corpus bursae is ovoid, not rounded, with less sclerotized signa. Th e appendix bursae is attached to the dorsal corpus bursae rather than to the left side and extends dorsally and to the left. Its surface is grooved producing a weak spiral of approximately 1.5 turns. Th e male antenna is beadlike ( L. phaea ) to biserrate (1.5× as wide as shaft in two Asian species ( Lafontaine and Kononenko 1988)).

Lasionycta phaea is the only North American member of the species-group. Three additional species, L. alpicola Lafontaine & Kononenko , L. buraetica Kononenko , and L. corax Kononenko , are found in central and western Asia ( Lafontaine and Kononenko 1988).

The species in this species-group were included in the L. skraelingia species-group by Lafontaine and Kononenko (1988). In addition to the structural differences between the species-groups, L. phaea fails to group with L. skraelingia and L. taigata on CO1 distance analysis, instead clustering near L. secedens ( Fig 247 ).

Figures

Figure 247. Neighbor-joining CO1 tree of North American Lasionycta, Psammopolia, Tricholita ferrisi and Eurasian Lasionhada proxima and Eriopygodes imbecilla. Incomplete haplotypes with 600–657 base pairs are denoted with (*) and those with 550–599 base pairs with (**). The letter and number code after each species is a unique haplotype identifier followed by the number of samples in parentheses. No data is available for Psammopolia insolens, P. sala, or P. ochracea. The illustrated species show a member of each species-group and are scaled to the same size. The Lasionycta leucocycla species-group is shown in Fig. 248.