Furcula gigans (McDunnough, 1922) St Laurent & Goldstein & Miller & Markee & Staude & Kawahara & Miller & Robbins, 2023

St Laurent, Ryan A., Goldstein, Paul Z., Miller, James S., Markee, Amanda, Staude, Hermann S., Kawahara, Akito Y., Miller, Scott E. & Robbins, Robert K., 2023, Phylogenetic systematics, diversification, and biogeography of Cerurinae (Lepidoptera: Notodontidae) and a description of a new genus, Insect Systematics and Diversity 7 (2), pp. 1-25 : 7

Furcula

The data support the need to reassess use of the name Furcula furcula in North America, as recently proposed by Miller et al. (2018). These authors determined that the North American F. occidentalis ( Lintner, 1878) represents two species. Based on Cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) ‘barcoding’ ( Hebert et al. 2003), the western North American populations are more closely related to Palearctic F. furcula than to North American F. occidentalis . In our analyses we included the following three relevant taxa: nominotypical F. furcula furcula from the United Kingdom, what was called ‘ F. furcula ’ in Miller et al. (2018) from Colorado, USA, and F. occidentalis from New York, USA. The phylogenetic results recover the two North American taxa as sister species with Old World F. furcula furcula sister to them, rendering ‘ Furcula furcula ’ sensu Miller et al. (2018) paraphyletic. Fortunately, two available names for American populations exist: deorum Dyar (TL: USA: Colorado, Manitou) and gigans McDunnough (TL: Canada: Alberta, Head of Pine Creek, Calgary), both of which were named in 1922, but with gigans being named earlier ( Dyar 1922a, McDunnough 1922). We therefore revalidate F. gigans stat. rev. to be applied to North American populations and synonymize F. deorum syn. nov. with F. gigans . Although we sampled F. gigans from Colorado, nearer to the type locality of deorum than to that of F. gigans from Alberta, ongoing phylogenomic efforts include a near topotype of F. gigans from Alberta, which is recovered as sister to, with weak genetic divergence from, the F. gigans from Colorado included in the present study, further supporting this synonymy (St Laurent in prep.). Miller et al. (2018) provided extensive morphological evidence supporting the separation of North American populations of F. gigans (as ‘ F. furcula ’) from F. occidentalis , but erroneously stated that the caterpillar of ‘ F. furcula ’ from North America was unknown. McDunnough (1922) provided a detailed description of the caterpillars of F. gigans , and it closely matches the known caterpillars of F. furcula and F. occidentalis . Future efforts should continue to examine fine-scale population genetics of F. furcula , its numerous Palearctic subspecies, and the American F. gigans and F. occidentalis , since this is a group with complex taxonomy and biogeography.