Calliptaminae

Massa, Bruno, 2020, Annotated checklist of Orthoptera of the Maltese Islands, Zootaxa 4885 (1), pp. 107-124 : 115-116

Subfamily: Calliptaminae

Calliptamus barbarus (Costa, 1836)

Common, often occurring in somewhat high-density populations within open karstland, colonized by a host of garrigue and steppic biotopes.

Distribution. Palaearctic region, ranging eastward from the Canary Islands and the Mediterranean, broadly on the same latitudinal band and extending onto the Middle Eastern and Oriental regions.

[ Calliptamus italicus (Linnaeus, 1758) ]

Although this species is listed by Valletta (1954) as “very common”, none of the Calliptamus specimens examined (n=95) in the authors’ collections were found to be C. italicus . Further field investigations may be useful. Before the revision of Calliptamus by Jago (1963), C. barbarus was often misidentified as C. italicus .