Polia nebulosa (Clerck, 1759)

Varga, Zoltán, Ronkay, Gábor, Nagy, Jenő & Ronkay, László, 2020, Contribution To The Taxonomy And Phylogeny Of The Genus Polia Ochsenheimer, 1816 (Noctuidae, Noctuinae, Hadenini): Species Groups And Pairs In The Holarctic Subgenus Polia S. Str., Acta Zoologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 66 (1), pp. 35-67 : 55

The Polia nebulosa species-group

Taxonomic notes. The detailed taxonomic and biogeographical survey of the species-group is recently published by VARGA et al. (2019). This group has a wide temperate Palaearctic ( P. nebulosa Hufnagel, 1766 ; P. lama Staudinger, 1896 ; P. goliath Oberthür, 1880 ) but also Nearctic distribution (see below). The three Palaearctic species are externally forming two groups as P. goliath is strikingly different from the often confusingly similar P. nebulosa and P. lama though both related species have conspicuous intraspecific differentiation, too. MCCABE (1980) already confirmed that four North American Polia species are closely related to the Eurasiatic P. nebulosa , and this Nearctic group of species is possibly a descendent of the “ nebulosa ”-lineage. It is differentiated from the P. piniae Buckett & Bauer, 1967 – P. discalis Grote, 1877 species-pair near to the Pacific coast, while P. nimbosa (Guenée, 1852) and P. imbrifera (Guenée, 1852) are widely distributed in the boreo-temperate zone.