Claremontia brevicornis

Claremontia brevicornis (Brischke, 1883)

Fig. 7B, C

Blennocampa brevicornis Brischke, 1883: 282-283. ♀. Syntypes (assumed). Type locality: Poland [“Westpreußen” = western Prussia]. Types probably lost (Blank and Taeger 1998).

Blennocampa puncticeps Konow, 1886a: 215-216. ♀, ♂. Syntypes. Type locality: Switzerland, Zürich. Lectotype ♀ (SDEI) designated by Koch (1988). Treated by Koch (1988) as a synonym of Claremontia confusa.

Monophadnoides puncticeps: Benson, 1952; treated as species distinct from M. confusa, and Poterium sanguisorba [currently Sanguisorba minor] recorded as host of larva. Chambers (1961): Potentilla reptans recorded as host of larva.

Biology.

ZMUO specimens, from Finland, are not reared; Sanguisorba, recorded as a host plant by Benson (1952), can be excluded as a possible host plant at these localities, but Potentilla erecta is present in abundance at one of the localities in Eastern Finland.

Taxonomic notes.

Konow (1886a), in a key, described the tibiae of Claremontia confusa (as Blennocampa confusa) as mainly black with only the knees very narrowly whitish and the protibia only whitish on the anterior face, and wrote that the tibiae of C. puncticeps were mainly pale. Benson (1952) and Lacourt (2020), among others, distinguished Claremontia brevicornis (as Claremontia confusa) from C. puncticeps using several characters, also including the color of the metatibia of females. However, Brischke (1883) described the metatibia of Claremontia brevicornis, a nominal species not known to Konow (1886a), as extensively yellow-white. Numerous barcoded females (SDEI, ZMUO) belong to two separate COI sequence clusters (distance 3.1-5.8%), which correlate fully with their leg color. Accordingly, we think that the original description of C. brevicornis refers to what has more recently come to be known as C. puncticeps, and that the correct name for the other species is C. confusa. Unlike some previous authors, we did not detect a clear difference in the sculpture of the head of the two forms. Distinction of the males is problematic, because of the lack of reliably identified male specimens of C. confusa. Benson (1952) stated that C. confusa "is entirely parthenogenetic, at least in Britain". On the other hand, several male specimens of C. brevicornis (Fig. 7C) have been barcoded, and can thus definitely be associated with that species. Based mainly on barcode-sequenced specimens in ZMUO, females of Claremontia confusa and C. brevicornis may be separated as follows.