PSYCHIDAE Boisduval, 1829, p 44

Roh, Seung Jin, Banasiak, Grzegorz & Byun, Bong-Kyu, 2015, A new and an unrecorded species of the family Psychidae (Lepidoptera) from Korea, with an annotated catalogue, Journal of Natural History 50, pp. 669-680 : 670-671

PSYCHIDAE Boisduval, 1829, p 44 .

Type genus: Psyche Schrank, 1801 .

Psychidae exhibits different evolutionary directions between males and females as small or medium-sized moths ( Holloway et al. 1987).

The head in the psychids is clothed with rough scales only in primitive genera such as Ceratosticha , Diplodoma and Taleporia , while in many of more specialised genera such as Eumeta it is clothed with more or less appressed scales ( Saigusa 1961; Sugimoto and Saigusa 2004). The adult female’ s wings are reduced to brachypterous (micropterous) or are completely obsolete, while adult males have well-developed wings. The mouthparts of the males are in a series of reduction; some genera have all elements of Ditrysian mouthparts including galea (proboscis) and maxillary palpi, while in other genera such as Eumeta the mouthparts consist of only a small tubercle representing the labium. Female adults have vestigial mouthparts. The forewing of male psychids has or has not either the discal cell or the intercalary cell. Also, the vein CuP of the forewing is free from any veins, fused with either vein A1+A2 or CuA2. The antennal scape has a long scaled fringe termed a pectin. The posterior area of the female’ s seventh abdominal segment has a corethrogyne consisting of scales or hairs. In addition, the tegumen and uncus of the male genitalia are fused with each other, and the posterior margin of the dorsum (part of uncus) is represented either by a pair of hooks or ended in a rounded margin without hooks. Also, the males are characterised by the absence of gnathos and juxta and the presence of a transitellar arm from the basal part of the costa of valva ( Kozhantshikov 1956; Saigusa 1961; Sugimoto and Saigusa 2004).

The zoogeographical distribution has been verified for Psychidae fauna: 514 species in the Palaearctic region (37%); 309 species in the Afrotropical region (22%); 26 species in the Nearctic region (2%); 81 species in the Neotropical region (6%); 229 species in the Oriental region (16%) ( Sobczyk 2011). Thus, most of the species are distributed in the Palaearctic and Afrotropical regions.

A catalogue of Psychidae in Korea