Pedesta masuriensis cuneomaculata Murayama, 1995

Chiba, Hideyuki, Tsukiyama, Hiroshi, Liang, Jia-Yuan, Wang, Shou-Ming, Shen, Zong-Yu & Hsu, Yu-Feng, 2020, The types of skippers described by Shu-Iti Murayama (Lepidoptera: Hesperiidae), Zootaxa 4801 (2), pp. 280-290 : 283

Pedesta masuriensis cuneomaculata Murayama, 1995

Nature & Insects 30(14): 33.

Labels : “ Yunnan Province (in Chinese character)/Dokanmura (= Tuguancun, in Chinese character)/ 24-V-1995 / S MURAYAMA,” “ Pedesta masuri-/ensis/cuneoma/culata/ HOLOTYPE.”

A male specimen was designated as the holotype by Murayama (1995), and the specimen was retrieved in LBM ( Figs. 25–27; Dried Insect Database Reg. no. 1500022032).

Huang (2011) treated cuneomaculata as a junior subjective synonym of Thoressa masuriensis tali (Swinhoe, 1912) . We agree that cuneomaculata is a synonym of tali . The nominate subspecies masuriensis Moore, 1878 and subspecies tali are significantly different in appearance ( Figs. 46–49), but Evans (1949) considered them as conspecific. However, masuriensis ( Figs. 46–47, 50) and tali ( Figs. 48–49, 51) are two different species, supported by distinctions in genitalia ( Figs. 50–51) and the genetic divergence of COI barcode between them (12–13%, Table 1). They may be separated by the following features: 1) uncus bent with blunt tips in masuriensis ( Fig. 50) versus straight with narrowed tips in tali ( Fig. 51); 2) left harpe with inner one of terminal processes as small lobe in masuriensis ( Fig. 50) versus produced serrate teeth in tali ( Fig. 51); 3) phallus short and stout in masuriensis ( Fig. 50) versus elongate and slender in tali ( Fig. 51). Those masuriensis molecular samples in China ( Li et al. 2019) all belong to tali .

Huang (2011) was correct in merging the Chinese taxa of Thoressa Swinhoe, 1913 and Pedesta Hemming, 1934 . His taxonomic treatment, however, was not complete because he did not include the type species of Thoressa . The genus Thoressa sensu Evans (1949) was polyphyletic and is now divided into three genera based on molecular evidences ( Huang et al. 2019). Those species assigned to Thoressa by Huang (2011) indeed should be included in Pedesta . Therefore, Pedesta tali comb. nov. is the valid name for this taxon.