Chrysis pyrrhina Dahlbom, 1845

Rosa, Paolo & Vardal, Hege, 2015, An annotated catalogue of the types of Chrysididae (Hymenoptera) at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, with brief historical notes, ZooKeys 495, pp. 79-132 : 97-98

Chrysis pyrrhina Dahlbom, 1845 Plate 16

Chrysis pyrrhina : Dahlbom 1845: 9.

Type locality.

unknown.

Holotype ♂.

[Mus. Payk.] [Type] [ pyrrhina Dahlbom 143] [NHRS-HEVA000001115].

Remarks.

The species was described with the name " Chrysis pyrrhinia Dalm. ♂ Mus. Paykull " and emendated in the same work ( Dahlbom 1845: corrigenda at pag. 21). The type locality reported by Kimsey and Bohart (1991: 454 "Yugoslavia, Dalmatia") is in error. Possibly they confused Dalm. [= Dalman] with Dalmatia. The type locality is unknown, as confirmed in Dahlbom (1854: 259): " Chrysis pyrrhina Dalman Mus. Paykulli; teste D. Boheman, qui specimen unicum, patria non notata, e Museo R. Acad. Scient. Stockholm. amice communicavit ".

Very likely Paykull received the male (described as pyrrhina ) and the female (described as erythromelas ) together, from the same locality, probably in north Africa. They both belong to the same species, Chrysis erythromelas Dahlbom, 1845, even if the male shows some peculiar characteristics which are not found in other northern African or Sicilian specimens: short pronotum, lateral angles on T-III more acute. The metasoma is entirely reddish, but this unusual colour was found also in other specimens in the Linsenmaier collection.

After Linsenmaier (1959) the name Chrysis pyrrhina was used to identify a common Mediterranean species ( Mingo 1994; Mingo and Gayubo 1985, 1986a, 1986b; Mingo et al. 1988, 1990; Rosa 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Strumia 1995, 1996, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Strumia and Pagliano 2010; Strumia et al. 2010). The type of Chrysis pyrrhina does not match Linsenmaier’s interpretation of the species and a new name must be given to this species.

The first available name from among its synonyms is Chrysis serena Radoszkowski, 1891. The type of Chrysis serena was checked and it is currently housed in the Radoszkowski collection in ISEA-PAS ( Rosa et al. 2015). Linsenmaier (1968: 82) considered Chrysis serena as a subspecies of Chrysis pyrrhina , with coarser and denser punctation on the metasoma, with micro-punctated intervals between the punctures and mesosoma greener in colour. The distribution given by Linsenmaier for Chrysis serena is: Persia, S Russia, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor and Manchuria. It is well known that in the Euro-Asiatic chrysidids, patterns in punctation have a gradient, becoming coarser from west to east. Similarly many common Chrysis are greener in the eastern area of their distribution in Europe. Chrysis serena simply represents the eastern form with coarser punctation.

Current status.

Chrysis erythromelas Dahlbom, 1845.