Typoderus Entypoderus Voss, 1965

Grebennikov, Vasily V., 2021, Sky islands of the Cameroon Volcanic Line support the westernmost clade of five new Typoderus weevils (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Molytinae), Arthropod Systematics & Phylogeny 79, pp. 57-74 : 57

= Typoderus Entypoderus Voss, 1965 syn. nov.

Typoderus Entypoderus Voss 1965: 332 (as subgenus of Typoderus Marshall, 1953). Type species: Typoderus deceptor Marshall, 1953 by original designation.

Available evidence.

Voss (1965: 332) established Typoderus Entypoderus for all Typoderus having seven antennomeres in the funicle and contrasted it with the nominative subgenus with five antennomeres in the funicle. In this situation, use of a single diagnostic character necessitates that at least one of its two states is not synapomorphic and, therefore, the proposed classification is not phylogenetic. Moreover, no practical need is served by sustaining subgenera in Typoderus , a relatively small genus of only 19 species (inclusion five new one and two new combinations; see below). Perhaps the entire category of a subgenus (as well as a subspecies; see ZINK 2004) might be entirely abolished in zoological classification, since its practical advantage as a name is often compromised by the unwieldiness of non-binominal species-level nomenclature. In other words, trinomial (or even tetranomial, if both subgeneric and subspecific names are used) names are more cumbersome, than practical. An efficient naming strategy offering a practical alternative is to use informal species groups, as implemented in the jewel beetles Agrilus Curtis, 1825 (the larger animal genus with over 3,000 valid species, Jendek and Grebennikov 2011), or as it prevails in arranging 1,665 species of Drosophila Fallén, 1823 fruit flies, the classical object of biological studies ( O’Grady and Desalle 2018). Only in a few cases do subgeneric names in hyperdiverse genera appear justified, and only in situations when a stable phylogeny has been first achieved (e.g. the ground beetle genus Bembidion Latreille, 1802 with over 1,300 species and over 50 subgenera, Maddison 2012, Maddison and Maruyama 2019; the ground beetle genus Carabus Linnaeus, 1858 with 940 species and 91 subgenera, Deuve et al. 2012; the fruit fly genus Drosophila Fallén, 1823 with 1,646 species taxonomically arranged in a number of subgenera and informal species group, O’Grady and Desalle 2018). Considering the above, both non-nominotypical Typoderus subgeneric names are herein synonymised and, therefore, the subgeneric classification of the genus is scrapped.