Agonocryptus Cushman, 1929

Supeleto, Fernanda A. & Aguiar, Alexandre P., 2022, One hundred new records, a new species, and the first pictures of Agonocryptus Cushman (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae, Cryptinae), Zootaxa 5178 (6), pp. 547-576 : 549

Agonocryptus Cushman

Gupta (1982) adopted the level of subspecies for 14 taxa, and this was maintained by Yu et al. (2016). Based on our comparative study of the specimens as well as in the critical usage of the work of Gupta, all such taxa proved sufficiently distinct and stable to be treated as full species. This new status is indicated below where applicable.

Diagnostic importance of color features. The species of Agonocryptus are quite uniform structurally but show a considerable intra-specific variation in sculpturing. Gupta (1982) interpreted and described quite well this kind of morphological variation for each species and went as far as proposing six groups of species “based on the sculpture of frons, vertex, and mesoscutum, length of petiole, and position of first abdominal sternite relative to the tergite.” The species and subspecies were however also characterized and recognized with substantial usage of color features, which exceed 43% of relative importance when compared to structural features in the key to species provided by that author ( Fig. 1 ). In fact, several species can only be differentiated in Gupta’s revision by color features alone ( A. physocnemis vs. A. nigristernum ; A. leurosus vs. A. flavosternum ; and A. varus vs. A. nigrifemur ) or rely heavily on color patterns as diagnostic features, such as in the A. rugifrons group. Even so, the high intra-specific variability of the color features was described by Gupta only for females of A. adustus (based on 3 specimens), A. argentinus (5), A. heathi (2), and A. rugifrons (32), the latter only for the tergites. For males, color variation was described with some detail only for A. adustus (6) and A. paulus (4).

Elevation preferences. Reasonable or sound bootstrap analyses of elevation data could be performed for 12 species ( Fig. 21 ), and they indicate some degree of stratification of preferences for given ranges. Most Agonocryptus seem to occur mostly in low altitudes, typically between 100–500 m ( Figs 21A–J ), including sometimes within quite strict ranges ( Figs 21A, I ). The most notable exceptions are A. adustus , with peaks of occurrence over a wide range of elevations ( Fig. 21K ), and A. rugifrons , which clearly prefers elevations around 1100 m ( Fig. 21L ).

Figures

FIGURE 1. Relative importance of structural (gray) vs. color (light blue) features in each dichotomy of the key to the species/ subspecies of Agonocryptus in Gupta (1982). Pondered importance calculated from the frequency and the order of appearance of each type of feature in each dichotomy, considering that more important features appear first. Normalized values. The average importance of color features is 0.434.

FIGURE 21. Typical elevation, in meters, for species of Agonocryptus with 6 or more confirmed records (N). Each histogram built from 200 bootstrap resampling. Results are sorted from lowest to highest average. Alphabetically: A. adustus (K); A. chichimecus (B); A. discoidaloides (A); A. flavosternum (C); A. fumosus (F); A. lioneli (D); A. nigristernum (H); A. physocnemis (J); A. rufithorax (E); A. rugifrons (L); A. russulus (G); A. varus (I).