Tapena bornea Evans, 1941

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui & Grishin, Nick V., 2022, Taxonomic changes suggested by the genomic analysis of Hesperiidae (Lepidoptera), Insecta Mundi 2022 (921), pp. 1-135 : 26

Tapena bornea Evans, 1941 and Tapena minuscula Elwes and Edwards, 1897 are species-level taxa

Presently placed as subspecies of Tapena thwaitesi Moore, [1881] (type locality Sri Lanka), Tapena thwaitesi bornea Evans, 1941 (type locality Malaysia: Perak) and Tapena minuscula Elwes and Edwards, 1897 (type locality Myanmar: Bernardmyo) show genitalic differences of the magnitude known for species level taxa. Genomic tree reveals a prominent separation between T. thwaitesi from Sri Lanka (NVG-18019A08) and T. bornea from Borneo: Kinabalu (NVG-18073F07). Their COI barcodes differ by 2.4% (16 bp). Although we have not sequenced T. minuscula , due to its genitalic differences from others we propose to treat both Tapena bornea Evans, 1941 and Tapena minuscula Elwes and Edwards, 1897 as species.