Bedosiallo St Laurent & Kawahara, 2018

Laurent, Ryan A. St & Kawahara, Akito Y., 2019, Reclassification of the Sack-bearer Moths (Lepidoptera, Mimallonoidea, Mimallonidae), ZooKeys 815, pp. 1-114 : 30

Bedosiallo St Laurent & Kawahara, 2018 Figs 32, 68, 144, 145

Type species.

Cicinnus forbesi Schaus, 1928.

Diagnosis.

Much like Bedosia in external shape and key features, but usually with much narrower wings; the genitalia, however, are very different from those of Bedosia , and are diagnostic of the genus (see apomorphies below).

Apomorphies.

Combination of following characters: (1) Small, heavily sclerotized gnathos situated very near uncus with mesal pair of closely parallel arms (distally fused in some species) (Fig. 32a); (2) Simple, narrow widely splayed valvae relative to widened ovoid vinculum (Fig. 32b).

Remarks.

Bedosiallo was found to be a strongly supported clade in St Laurent et al. (2018a), where two species of this genus that apparently represented two distinct species-groups within Bedosiallo were sampled and found sister to one another, which together were sister to Bedosia fraterna , type specie Bedosia . Although sampling of Bedosia was relatively poor in St Laurent et al. (2018a), we have since examined the genitalia of nearly all Bedosia species (including those erroneously placed in Cicinnus by Schaus (1928)), finding consistent complex male genitalia, which are readily divergent from the much simpler genitalia of Bedosiallo . In the description of Bedosiallo , all described species were dissected and their genitalia figured, displaying the consistent genitalia in that genus, as well as the consistent difference from all known Bedosia species ( St Laurent et al. 2018a). Below in the checklist we transfer two additional species to Bedosiallo from Cicinnus : B. minimalis Herbin and C. Mielke, comb. n. and B. gentilis (Schaus), comb. n. These two species display genitalia much more in line with those of the described Bedosiallo species than to any Bedosia species, but do differ in some respects, particularly in the more closely fused gnathos, triangular valvae shape, juxtal configuration, and presence of cornuti (see Annotations in Section 4). Bedosiallo minimalis was included in our morphological phylogenetic analyses, and was placed within Bedosiallo in all analyses (Suppl. materials 5, 7) except the constrained ML analysis (Fig. 1). We attribute the somewhat unique genitalia of B. minimalis to result in this conflicting placement, and while B. gentilis and B. minimalis may eventually prove to belong to an entirely new genus considering such unique traits, we are confident that these small moths are more closely related to Bedosiallo than Bedosia in comparing the genitalia of all species in Bedosiini , and certainly do not belong in Cicinnus as they were originally placed.