Apiocera (Ripidosyrma) braunsi Melander, 1907

Dikow, Torsten & Agosti, Donat, 2015, Utilizing online resources for taxonomy: a cybercatalog of Afrotropical apiocerid flies (Insecta: Diptera: Apioceridae), Biodiversity Data Journal 3, pp. 5707-5707 : 5707

Apiocera (Ripidosyrma) braunsi Melander, 1907

Apiocera braunsi Melander 1907: 126

Distribution

South Africa (Eastern Cape, Western Cape)

Notes

Institutions with specimens: AMGS, BMNH, NMSA, SAMC, SANC, SMNS, TMSA, USNM, ZSMC.

Two museum collections claim to house the holotype of A. braunsi . Stuckenberg (1968), in transferring Asilus alastor to Apiocera , notes that he has seen "part of the type series of braunsi", but he does not indicate where these specimens are deposited. However, Melander (1907), in describing A. braunsi , states that he has only seen a single specimen, a male. What appears to have happened is that J. Brauns collected three specimens on 1 January 1905 of an Apiocera species and dispersed them shortly thereafter to two individuals. One specimen was sent along with other Asilidae and Mydidae to A.L. Melander in the USA and two specimens ended up in the Transvaal Museum (TMSA, now Ditsong National Museum of Natural History) in Pretoria where Brian Stuckenberg must have studied them. The entire Transvaal Museum Diptera collection was donated to the KwaZulu-Natal Museum (NMSA) in 1974 ( Londt 1998) and this is how a male and a female of A. braunsi arrived at the NMSA where the male was regarded as the holotype ( Yeates 1994). Yeates (1994) mentions that the A.L. Melander collection was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (USNM) and that no specimen matching the collection event data could be found. However, there is a specimen clearly marked as holotype in the USNM collection that arrived there in 1961 when the Melander collection was incorporated. NMSA Diptera curator Burgert Muller and I compared images of the putative male holotype specimens in each collection and the USNM specimen does match the whole habitus illustration provided in Melander (1907) perfectly (the way the abdomen is bent dorsally and the shape of the epandrial plume, compare lateral view of the holotype in original publication with image of USNM holotype). Therefore, we regard the USNM specimen to be the holotype and the NMSA specimens (1 male and 1 female) as non-type specimens.