Agonochaetia shawinigan Landry, 2017

Landry, Jean-François, Nazari, Vazrick, Bidzilya, Oleksiy, Huemer, Peter & Karsholt, Ole, 2017, Review of the genus Agonochaetia Povolný (Lepidoptera, Gelechiidae), and description of a new genus and species from the Canary Islands, Zootaxa 4300 (4), pp. 451-485 : 469-470

7. Agonochaetia shawinigan Landry , sp. nov.

( Figs 8 , 33 )

urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:63E1C708-2C93-4083-8E6A-89476968F237

Type material. Holotype ♂: “ QUÉBEC | St-Maurice | Notre-Dame-du- | Mont-Carmel | 24 Jun 1996, au vol | leg. L.- P. Landry ” [white label]; CNCLEP | 00002751” [white label]; “genitalia dissection | MIC 4240 ♂ ” [green label]; “ Agonochaetia | sp. ’98 | R.W. Hodges ” [white hand-written label]; “ Barcode of Life Project | Leg removed | DNA extracted” [blue label]; “ HOLOTYPE ♂ | Agonochaetia | shawinigan | J.- F. Landry ” [orange, partly printed, partly hand-written] ( CNC).

DNA Barcode BIN. BOLD:AAH8547 (n=1). The minimum distance to the nearest neighbor Lutilabria lutilabrella is 7.7%.

Adult ( Fig. 8 ). Wingspan 21 mm. Head grey brown, collar ochreous brown. Thorax and tegulae dark brown. Labial palpus slender, segment 2 nearly twice length and width of segment 3, without pecten; both segments mottled with brown and creamy scales, darker on the outer surface. Antenna dorsally dark brown, flagellomeres each with proximal row of scales brown and distal row contrastingly dirty white; scape without pecten. Forewing uniformly dark brown without spots or fasciae, individual scales with pale creamy base and dark brown two-thirds; terminal fringe greyish white suffused with dark brown. Hindwing upper surface dark brown, darker than forewing, ciliae brownish grey suffused with brown; underside paler grey brown.

Male genitalia ( Fig. 33 ). Tegumen elongate with deep and roundly arched anterior notch (TGN/TGL = 0.54). Uncus trapezoid, 0.4x length of tegumen, anterior margin fused to distal margin of tegumen and with delineation from latter somewhat indistinct as a dorso-lateral sulcus/impression, apical margin transversely straight, lined with several short setae, with shallow medial indentation. Gnathos with proximal arms short, stubby, apices club-like and not mesially joined; mesio-distal arm free from proximal arms, reduced to small, thin, bracelet-like sclerotized band embedded in apical part of culcitula. Culcitula a large, elongate, pouch-like lobe extended from apex of uncus to slightly below apex of proximal arms of gnathos. Vinculum transverse, with deep V-shaped medio-posterior emargination, ventral wall between cucullus base and vincular lobes finely wrinkled; vincular lobes large, stout, rounded and hump-like, mesio-dorsal surface densely and finely setose; saccus very slender and thin, slightly broadened basally, about 1.6x length of valva, apex slightly dilated. Cucullus narrow, inner (ventral) margin roundly widened in distal third and with outer wall finely setose, distal ¼ slender, digitiform, extended beyond apex of uncus. Sacculus strongly downcurved at almost 90° (appearing incurved in flattened preparation), apex widened and shallowly concave with acuminate tip. Paired glandiductor lobes needle-like, outwardly and upwardly curved, slightly sinuate, slightly longer (1.1x) than phallus, anterior half dilated. Phallus straight, apex with small triangular thorn projected dorsally, slightly longer (1.2x) than saccus, caecum bulbous, about 0.15x length of phallus, inception of ductus ejaculatorius dorso-anterior on caecum.

Female genitalia. Unknown.

Diagnosis. Externally A. shawinigan is an unmarked dark brown species with the hindwing upper surface darker than that of the forewing. In genitalia the saccus is the longest of all Agonochaetia species (1.58x longer than the valva) and very thin, the vincular lobes are large, densely setose and in a V-shape arrangement with rounded apices and wide anterior ends, the apex of the sacculus is dilated with a concave margin and a produced, acuminate tip, and the glandiductors and phallus are very long and slender (the most of any Agonochaetia species with GL/VLL = 2.05).

In male genitalia A. shawinigan is similar to A. conspersa in having the saccus longer than the valva (SAL / VLL = 1.58 in A. shawinigan ; 1.31 in A. conspersa ) whereas the saccus is shorter than the valva in all Palearctic species (SAL /VLL ratio = 0.66–0.89). In A. conspersa , the vinculum lobes are arranged in a broad U-shape with oblique apices and narrow anterior ends, the medio-posterior emargination is trapezoid, and the apex of the sacculus, although dilated, is indistinctly concave and the tip pointed and less produced.

Superficially A. shawinigan resembles the Central Palearctic A. lvovskyi in having the upper surface dark brown, but in the latter species the hindwing is not darker than the forewing and the forewing has a small pale costal spot distally. The hindwing upper surface being noticeably darker than the forewing is an unusual feature for Gnorimoschemini and Gelechiidae in general, in which the hindwing upper surface paler than the forewing is the overwhelmingly prevalent state.

Etymology. “ Shawinigan ” is a transliteration of an aboriginal Abenaqui expression, which means “sloped portage”, “portage on the crest”, or “angled portage”. It refers to the narrow and steep portage at the base of the first falls on the Saint-Maurice River (up from the Saint-Lawrence River of which the Saint-Maurice is a tributary). The location is where the original town of Shawinigan was established in the 1800s. The locality of Notre-Damedu-Mont-Carmel where the type specimen was discovered by Léo-Paul Landry is a parish municipality in the Mauricie region of Québec, which is now included in the City of Shawinigan . The Abenaqui are the aboriginal people who inhabited the region when the French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. The species name is a noun in apposition.

Biology. Unknown. The holotype was collected in flight during the day in late June in a rural backyard with sod over sandy soil. Although the grounds were regularly mowed, the adjacent property was not maintained and was covered with milkweed ( Asclepias syriaca ) and other weedy forbs. The housing development was built over abandoned agricultural lands with a dominant vegetation of Acer rubrum and Larix laricina interspersed with shrubs on sandy ridges.

Distribution ( Fig. 43 ). Known from a single specimen from the type locality in Québec.

Remarks. The apparent small pale costal spots visible near the apex of the forewings of the holotype of A. shawinigan ( Fig 8 ) are pin marks. The very dark hindwings in this otherwise non-descript brown gelechiid is what attracted JFL’s attention when he first saw the specimen among a lot of unidentified Gelechiidae brought to him by the collector Léo-Paul Landry.

Figures

FIGURES 1 – 12. Adults. 1, A. conspersa ♂ (HT); 2, A. impunctella ♀ (HT); 3, A. incredibilis ♂ (HT); 4, A. intermedia ♂; 5, A. intermedia ♀; 6, A. lvovskyi ♂ (HT); 7, A. quartana ♀ (HT); 8, A. shawinigan ♂ (HT); 9 – 11, A. terrestrella ♀♀; 12, A. tuvella ♂.

FIGURES 33 – 36. Male genitalia of Agonochaetia species and Canarischema fuerteventura. 33, A. shawinigan ♂ (HT) (slide MIC 4240); 34, A. terrestrella ♂ (slide 14978 NHMW); 35, A. tuvella ♂ (slide 66 / 03 O. Bidzilya); 36, Canarischema fuerteventura ♂ (HT) (slide 6319 H. Hendriksen).

FIGURES 43 - 44. 43, Map of type localities (red stars) and distribution (red dots) of Agonochaetia and Canarischema (yellow star). 44, Bayesian inference of relationships between selected Gnorimoschemini genera based on COI barcode data. Values above nodes are posterior probabilities; those below nodes are bootstrap values from the Parsimony analysis (values from the Maximum Likelihood analysis were very similar).