Anillinus minor Zaballos and Mateu, 1997

Sokolov, I. M. & Carlton, C. E., 2012, Species Of Anillinus Casey (Coleoptera: Carabidae: Trechinae) Described From Brazil And Their Relation To North American Representatives Of The Genus, The Coleopterists Bulletin 66 (3), pp. 245-249 : 246

Anillinus minor Zaballos and Mateu, 1997

Anillinus minor Zaballos and Mateu 1997: 134 .

The most distinctive character mentioned by the authors in the description of this species is the presence of visible setae on the ventral part of the median lobe of the aedeagus. Among eastern U.S. Anillinus species , this character is known only for Anillinus steevesi Barr (Barr 1995; Sokolov and Carlton 2010) and one undescribed species which may be regarded as a possible sister species of the former. Thus, the A. steevesi lineage is characterized by the presence of these distinct median lobe setae. When illustrations of the aedeagi of A. steevesi and A. minor are compared, they match in all significant diagnostic features ( Fig. 1 ). These features include the acute apex of the median lobe with a finger-like incision, the curved and elongate armature of the endophallus, similar setation on the ventral side of the median lobe, short right paramere, and similar shape of the left paramere. Small discrepancies are explainable by the rotational orientation of the aedeagi along the horizontal axis and an obvious mistake in the scale bar on Zaballos and Mateu’ s drawing (according to the scale bar, the aedeagus would exceed the length of the beetle). The concave apex of the median lobe even suggests a regional affinity with the southern populations of A. steevesi in the northeastern corner of Georgia and the northern counties of Alabama and Mississippi (Sokolov and Carlton 2010). Based on the overwhelming similarity in these diagnostic features, we consider A. minor to be a synonym of A. steevesi .

Figures

Fig. 1. Figures with drawings of the aedeagus of Anillinus steevesi from previous publications. A) From original description (Barr 1995), B) From a review of the loweae species-group (Sokolov and Carlton 2010), C) From the description of Anillinus minor (Zaballos and Mateu 1997).