Ribautocapsus tezcani Çerçi, 2024

Çerçi, Barış, Koçak, Özgür & Tezcan, Serdar, 2024, Review of the Heteroptera (Hemiptera) fauna of Turkey: perspectives for future research, European Journal of Taxonomy 937, pp. 1-127 : 49-63

Ribautocapsus tezcani Çerçi sp. nov.

urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:770E1C2C-3640-4A0D-A597-9C1D1A5587D9

Fig. 22

Diagnosis

The new species is characterized by the combination of following features: tricolorous hemelytra with basal half orange, distal half mostly dark brown with a white band along apical margin of corium and another narrower horizontal white band between the color zones, disc of pronotum not inflated, scutellum with a distinct protuberance, clypeus separated from frons, very large right paramere and very small and simple U-shaped vesica with apical secondary gonopore.

DIfferentIal dIagnosIs

Following the identification key provided by Wagner (1974), the new species keyes out to Ribautocapsus . Only known species of this rarely collected genus, R. bruckii (Reuter, 1879) , is known from the West Mediterranean region and characterized by wide and robust body, pseudobrachypterous female, base of vertex without a keel, clypeus not separated from frons by angle, pronotum remarkably inflated, scutellum with a cone shaped protuberance and hemelytra with two white bands, the basal one starkly shrinking medially ( Wagner 1974; Streito & Matocq 2006). The new species shows several diagnostic features of this genus, e.g., wide and robust, pseudobrachypterous female, vertex without keel, cone shaped protuberance of scutellum and double white bands of hemelytra. However, it lacks rest of the diagnostic criteria: clypeus distinctly separated from frons ( Fig. 22D), pronotum not inflated ( Fig. 22C) and basal white band of hemelytra not shrinking ( Fig. 22A–B). Despite these differences, both species are confirmed to be congeneric, based on essentially identical male genitalia ( Fig. 22E–G) (A. Matocq, pers. comm.). Secondary gonopore is located preapically or far away from apex in most species of Hallodapini , hence vesica with apically located secondary gonopore is an important diagnostic feature of Ribautocapsus . Apart from abovementioned differences, the new species is distinguished from R. bruckii by several remarkable features. The most remarkable difference is the starkly contrasting orange and dark brown colored zones of hemelytra. Although hemelytra of R. bruckii show color changes from dark brown to pale brown, these are not contrasting in two separate zones, as in the new species. The pronotum has pale semilunar markings at the posterior margin in the new species, whereas the pronotum of R. bruckii is unicolorous. The apical white band reaches the tip of clavus in the new species whereas this white band does not even reach medial border of corium in R. bruckii . Finally, the general coloration of the new species is reddish brown whereas R. bruckii is dark brown colored.

Etymology

The name of the new species is dedicated to Prof. Dr. Serdar Tezcan, a renowned Turkish entomologist who has worked on elucidation of the diverse entomofauna of Turkey for decades and is currently the curator of Lodos Entomological Museum, İzmir, Turkey (LEMT). He was also a member of the expedition carried out in the Mediterranean region of Turkey between 1984 and 1987, during which this new species was collected.

Type material

Holotype

TURKEY – Hatay Province • ♂; Yayladağ ; 10 Jul. 1984; EUAPP exped.; on Platanus sp. ; LEMT.

Paratypes

TURKEY – Hatay Province • 1 ♂, 5 ♀♀; same data as for holotype; LEMT .

Description

Male

COLORATION. Tricolored, reddish brown, orange and white. Head unicolorous reddish brown. Antennae entirely reddish brown, base of fourth segment slightly paler. Pronotum reddish brown, base of pronotum with two semilunar, pale patches. Scutellum reddish brown, a large orange colored rectangular patch on each anterior corner. Basal half of hemelytra uniformly orange colored, distal half dark brown except for distal margin of corium which has a broad white band and a small orange spot laterally, a narrow, sharply bordered white stripe separating basal orange and distal dark brown areas, equally wide at corium and clavus, anteriorly bordered very narrowly with a dark brown band. Basal ⅔ of exocorium yellow, distal ⅓ dark brown, change of coloration diffuse, cuneus dark brown. Membrane grayish. Femora and tibiae reddish brown, joints pale, coxae whitish yellow. Abdomen dark brown, thoracic pleura light brown.

VESTITURE. Dorsum with short, erected pale setae on head, pronotum, hemelytra and also present on eyes. Antennae with double vestiture, densely covered with short adpressed pale setae, and sparsely with short erect pale setae.

STRUCTURE. Macropterous or pseudomacropterous, size 3.8–4.0 mm, oblong-ovate, 3.3× as long as width of pronotum. Head transverse, 0.62× as long as wide, 0.8× as long as high in lateral view, frons slightly globose, clypeus separated from this, ocular index 1.75, rostrum reaching posterior coxae. Antennal segments equally thick, as thick as anterior tibia, last antennal segment gradually narrowed apically, first antennal segment as long as vertex, second antennal segment 1.6× as long as diatone, 1.15× as long as width of posterior margin of pronotum, 0.8–0.9× as long as combined length of last two segments, ratios of antennal segments 10:27:18:14. Pronotum tall and close to rectangular, 0.66× as long as wide, posterior margin 2.1–2.4× as wide as anterior one, with a very narrow collar, lateral margins concave, posterior corners rounded but distinctly protruding, posterior margin shallowly concave. Scutellum with a distinct protuberance medially. Hemelytra parallel sided in basal ⅔, distinctly enlarged at distal ⅓, distal ⅓ of corium and basal ⅓ of clavus mat, rest of hemelytra shiny, surpassing tip of abdomen. Legs short and thick.

GENITALIA. Left paramere as in Fig. 22F. Right paramere large, as in Fig. 22E. Vesica small, simple, U-shaped, secondary gonopore apically located, without any sclerotized processes ( Fig. 22G).

Female

Similar to male, differs in following morphometric characters: size 3.9–4.3 mm, ocular index 2.0 and ratios of antennal segments 10:27:21:14.

Biology

The new species was collected from Platanus sp.

Checklist of species of Heteroptera of Turkey

The checklist of the Heteroptera species of Turkey is presented at the end of the article (Appendix 1). The data used for analysis below is given in Supp. file 1. In this supplementary file, chorotypes and provincial distribution of each species are given with references. Species in red need confirmation, those in yellow are newly described and those in green are newly recorded from Turkey. A column for each ecoregion, t-SNE suggested group and province is provided that allows for filtration. For example, filtering for the value ‘TRUE’ in Karaman column gives the complete list of species recorded from Karaman. Additionally, lists of referenced articles, number of species recorded from each province and ecoregion, chorotypical composition of provinces, chorotype composition of t-SNE suggested groups and species absent from Turkey but known from its neighboring countries, are given in separate sheets.

Analysis of the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey

To analyze the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey, we first prepared an up-to-date checklist of all the Heteroptera species recorded from Turkey. Later, we compiled literature records of each species that constitute their first mention from a province, to determine the known distribution of each species, at the provincial level. We enhanced our data by including 5047 Research Grade observations of Heteroptera species from Turkey published in the observation-sharing platform iNaturalist. 493 new provincial records were found for 336 species among these observations (Supp. file 2). Additionally, we also included 53 unpublished new provincial records for 40 species, based on specimens from the private collection of Ernst Heiss, recently donated to Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum (E. Heiss, pers. comm.). Finally, we assigned a chorotype to each species, in accordance with the chorotypes as defined by Vigna Taglianti et al. (1999) and based on their known Palearctic and worldwide distribution given by Aukema (2023). As a result, we determined that 1668 Heteroptera species have been recorded from Turkey up to now. The first checklist of Heteroptera species of Turkey, published by Hoberlandt (1952, 1956), included 941 species, subspecies and varieties. However, after re-evaluating these records in accordance with contemporary taxonomic concepts, we found that 784 species had been recorded from Turkey, until 1956. The last checklist of Heteroptera species of Turkey, published by Önder et al. (2006), included 1526 species. However, we determined that, by the end of 2005, only 1456 species had been recorded from Turkey. Finally, the up-to-date online database of Catalogue of Palaearctic Heteroptera , by Aukema (2023), lists only 1519 Heteroptera species from Turkey.

The preliminary analysis of the composition of Heteroptera fauna of Turkey, by Hoberlandt (1956), indicated that 55% and 15% of recorded species were of Mediterranean and European origin, respectively. In our analysis, we determined that 23.92% of species (399 spp.) belonged to Mediterranean related chorotypes, 22.78% of species (380 spp.) belonged to European related chorotypes, 16.85% of species (281 spp.) showed local distribution patterns around Turkey, 10.91% of species (182 spp.) showed widespread distribution, 7.67% of species (128 spp.) were endemic to Turkey, 7.61% of species (127 spp.) had Turanian related chorotypes, 5.45% of species (91 spp.) belonged to Turano-Mediterranean chorotype, 4.08% of species (68 spp.) had Europeo-Mediterranean chorotype and 0.72% of species (12 spp.) were invasive alien species. The percentages of individual chorotypes within these chorotype groups are summarized in Fig. 24.

In a further analysis, we determined the species composition of each province. As a result, we found that the Mediterranean species were richer in provinces along western and southern coasts of Turkey ( Fig. 25). European species, on the other hand, were more abundant in provinces along the Black Sea coast, inner Aegean region and north of Eastern Anatolian region ( Fig. 26). Both Turanian and locally distributed elements constituted a higher percentage of the recorded species in the provinces of the Central and Southeastern Anatolian regions ( Figs 27–28). Finally, endemic species are concentrated in the Central Anatolian and the Mediterranean regions ( Fig. 29). We also recognized that the percentage of widespread species in a province had a strong negative correlation with the total number of species recorded from this province (Spearman correlation coefficient: -0,711, p <0.001). The chorotype composition of each province and ecoregion is given in Table 1.

To compare provinces, based on the composition of chorotype groups, we performed t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) analysis, a statistical method to visualize high-dimensional data in a two-dimensional space ( Maaten & Hinton 2008). Importantly, we excluded alien species and species with widespread chorotypes, as these species do not represent the fauna of a province and the latter is associated with how well a province has been studied. Furthermore, we excluded provinces with less than 100 species recorded, because we recognized that such a low number of species cannot reflect the true species composition of a region. Figure 30 illustrates the results of the t-SNE analysis. As expected, provinces that are close to each other are aggregated in the graph and have similar composition of chorotypes ( Fig. 31). On the bottom right corner of the graph, provinces with high proportions of the Mediterranean (30.64%), Local (19.61%) and Turanian (9.95%) chorotype groups and a low proportion of the European (18.74%) chorotype groups, are aggregated (Group 1). These provinces are Adıyaman, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Mardin, Siirt and Şanlıurfa from the Southeastern Anatolian region; Adana, Hatay, Kahramanmaraş, Mersin and Osmaniye from the Mediterranean region; Karaman and Niğde from the Central Anatolian region and Elazığ, Malatya and Tunceli from the Eastern Anatolian regions. Provinces with the following characteristics are aggregated in the upper right corner (Group 2): almost equally high proportions of European- (28.69%) and Mediterranean-related (33.80%) chorotypes, but the latter is slightly more dominant, and low proportions of Local (11.38%) and Turanian (5.46%) related chorotypes. These provinces are Antalya from the Mediterranean region; Aydın, İzmir, Manisa, Muğla, and Uşak from the Aegean region; Balıkesir, Bursa, Çanakkale, İstanbul, Kırklareli and Tekirdağ from the Marmara region; and Amasya from the Black Sea region. On the lower middle region of the graph, provinces with slightly more dominant European chorotype groups (26.68%) than Mediterranean chorotype groups (26.08%) but with higher proportions of local (15,87%) and Turanian (10,34%) chorotype groups, are aggregated (Group 3). These provinces are Ankara, Eskişehir, Kayseri, Kırşehir, Konya, Nevşehir, and Sivas from the Central Anatolian region; Burdur and Isparta from the Aegean region; Çorum and Tokat from the Black Sea region and Iğdır and Van from the Eastern Anatolian region. On the left side of the graph, provinces with high proportions of European-related chorotypes (37.15%) and low proportions of Mediterranean-related chorotypes (22.53%), are aggregated (Group 4). These provinces are Ağrı, Erzincan, Erzurum, and Kars from the Eastern Anatolian region; Artvin, Bolu, Çankırı, Düzce, Giresun, Karabük, Kastamonu, Ordu, Samsun, Sinop and Zonguldak from the Black Sea region; Bilecik, Edirne, Kocaeli, and Sakarya from the Marmara region and Afyonkarahisar and Kütahya from the Aegean region ( Table 2).

Analysis of the publications on the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey

The research on the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey dates back to the first half of the 19 th century, with the description of Mustha spinosula ( Lefebvre, 1831) from Turkey by Lefebvre (1831). Hoberlandt (1956) compiled all the important faunistic research on the Heteroptera species of Turkey, published until 1955. With this paper, we have compiled all of the faunistic research on the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey which includes either a new species record for Turkey or a province. As a result, we determined that 642 articles and books dealing with faunistic of the Heteroptera of Turkey have been published. When these papers were analyzed according to their year of publication, we observed that the number of papers published before 1950 was considerably low (86, 13.4%) and the number of papers published had increased greatly in the 1950s and remained stably high, at around 50 papers per decade, until 2000s ( Fig. 32). Since the beginning of 21 st century, a remarkable increase in the papers published on the faunistic of Heteroptera species of Turkey, occurred. Alone, between 2010 and 2019, 150 papers were published, which is almost equivalent to the number of papers published in the three decades between 1970 and 2000.

Analysis of the number of species recorded in Turkey and each province

We also analyzed the number of species newly recorded from Turkey by each decade ( Fig. 33). It is observed that about 90 new species per decade have been recorded from Turkey, between 1861 and 1920. The total number of newly recorded species decreased abruptly to 50 in the following three decades. In the decade between 1950 and 1959, the number of newly recorded species increased to 273 and this number has been decreasing almost every decade since then, except for the last decade. Between 2010 and 2019, the number of newly recorded Heteroptera species increased by more than two-fold compared to the preceding decade. This increase is in accordance with the abovementioned observations.

Additionally, to determine the gaps in our knowledge of the Heteroptera fauna of Turkey, we also analyzed the number of species recorded from each province and region ( Table 1). On average, 212 species are recorded per province, however, the median is 180 and most provinces have less than 212 species recorded. The number of species recorded from each region is as follows: Central Anatolian region (1040 spp.), Mediterranean region (1010 spp.), Marmara region (824 spp.), Aegean region (758 spp.), Black Sea region (759 spp.), Eastern Anatolian region (741 spp.), and Southeastern Anatolian region (587 spp.). These data highlight the fact that the Eastern Anatolian, Southeastern Anatolian, and Black Sea regions are less studied than other regions. Surprisingly, the number of Heteroptera species recorded from the Aegean region is comparable with the Black Sea and the Eastern Anatolian regions, even though the former has been studied extensively, compared to the last two regions. The top ten provinces with the most species recorded are the following: Ankara (633 spp.), İzmir (579 spp.), Adana (542 spp.), Mersin (509 spp.), Hatay (473 spp.), Antalya (460 spp.), Karaman (460 spp.), Kahramanmaraş (410 spp.), Bursa (406 spp.) and Konya (405 spp.). We noticed that most of the provinces in Eastern Anatolian and Southeastern Anatolian regions have comparatively small numbers of recorded species. Interestingly, the number of species recorded from provinces in the Black Sea region were also exceptionally low, especially the provinces in the eastern Black Sea subregion. Another interesting finding is that inner Aegean region provinces also have a small number of species recorded ( Fig. 34).

Finally, to highlight the potential of discoveries that can be made in future studies, we compiled Heteroptera species that have been recorded from neighbors of Turkey. Çerçi et al. (2022) had already demonstrated that 255 species that were known from at least one of the three Transcaucasian countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, were not recorded from Turkey and highlighted the fact that future research done in the Eastern Anatolian region of Turkey would have great potential to discover many of these species. We expand this analysis to all the neighboring countries of Turkey. As a result of our analysis, we reveal that 1255 species were recorded from at least one of its neighboring countries, but not from Turkey (Supp. file 1, Absent species sheet). Among these, 39 species, listed in Table 3, were recorded from four or more neighboring countries of Turkey and these species are very likely to be discovered in Turkey in the future. Furthermore, 70 species are known from any three neighboring countries of Turkey and 279 species from any two neighboring countries. Finally, 867 species are known from a single neighboring country of Turkey. Consequently, 109 species are known from three or more neighboring countries of Turkey, and the majority of these species are likely to be discovered from Turkey, in the future.