Illidops sophrosine ( Nixon, 1976 )

Höcherl, Amelie, 2025, Revision of Holarctic Illidops Mason (Hymenoptera, Braconidae): A first step towards resolving a dark taxon and descriptions of three new species, European Journal of Taxonomy 1031, pp. 1-121 : 73

Illidops sophrosine ( Nixon, 1976)

Table 6

Apanteles sophrosine Nixon, 1976: 713 , fig. 9.

Species concept

Our species concept is based mostly on the information available in Nixon (1976), which was reiterated in following publications by Papp (1981), Tobias & Kotenko (1986), and Kotenko (2007). → *.

Ecology / host information

Host unknown.

Distribution

PAL: Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Russia (ZAB, PRI).

Molecular data

We observed specimens of two barcoding clusters which morphologically resemble I. sophrosine (also see Table 6 and Figs 41–43): BOLD:ADU8837 and BOLD:AEO8202. However, these clusters are far apart from each other with minimum p-distances of 6.0%. The clusters are clearly separated, also taking into account the within-BIN maximum p-distances of 0.8% (BOLD:ADU8837) and 0.16% (BOLD:AEO8202). The Nearest Neighbors (NN) in the BOLD database are different clusters, found in different biogeographic regions and not identified to species level. Only BOLD:ADU8837 is quite close to its NN BOLD:AEI2994 with a minimum p-distance of 1.77%; however we were unable to observe any specimens of the NN BIN – and the morphology is quite cryptic in any case, so we cannot draw any conclusions based on morphology at this point. It is currently impossible to match any of these BINs unambiguously to the name I. sophrosine and there may be more barcoding clusters and cryptic morphology in the future, which is why we prefer to keep the clusters as I. cf. sophrosine for now.

Remarks

Holotype female, NHMUK. Country of type locality: Italy. The type was examined by Fernandez-Triana et al. (2020).

This species is morphologically similar to the I. naso complex. According to Nixon (1976), I. sophrosine can be distinguished from A. contortus (jun. syn. of I. naso ), A. evander (jun.syn. of I. naso ) and I. cloelia based on the following characters: “Eyes large; in lateral view of head fully twice as wide as width of head behind them; head from above markedly wider than mesoscutum” ( Nixon 1976: 709). We found the character regarding the width of the eyes rather difficult to observe depending on specimen orientation, but it seems to be relatively consistent among our barcoding clusters (compare Fig. 41). The two barcoding clusters we consider to be associated with I. sophrosine can currently not be clearly distinguished by morphology.