Auletobius anceps (Attelabidae), Voss, 1922

Stüben, Peter E., Schütte, André & Astrin, Jonas J., 2021, Barcoding and interspecific relationships of Macaronesian Weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionoidea), Beiträge Zur Entomologie = Contributions to Entomology 71 (1), pp. 127-135 : 130-131

Auletobius anceps (Attelabidae) – a species complex?

The species is highly polymorphic on the Canary Islands. Based on the lectotype in the British Museum (coll. Wollaston), the species is one of the smaller representatives of the genus (1.5-2.8 mm), the antennal club is darkened and thus clearly separated from the rest of the yellow antenna, the onychium is short and at most as long as first tarsomere and almost always the sutural strip is conspicuously black or dark brown. However, there are specimens on Tenerife and Gran Canaria that deviate considerably from this. They are much larger (up to 4 mm), have entirely yellow antennae and a darkened sutural stripe on the elytra is sometimes missing. This diversity or variability, on the other hand, is not clearly comprehensible in the molecular phylogram, which leads to the assumption that this could be a very recent lineage split .

On La Palma, on the other hand, there is another species besides A. anceps and A. cylindricollis , which the first author was able to record for the first time on Mount Tagoja (La Palma) and which so far can only be separated molecularly - albeit by high edge lengths in the CO1 phylogram (listed under the sequencing number “1699-PST”). Its morphological differential diagnosis causes great difficulties, and in any case further sequence analyses of specimens from many other localities will be needed in the future.