Aethes Billberg 1820

Aethes Billberg, 1820

Type species: Pyralis smeathmanniana Fabricius, 1781.

Aethes (with its many synonyms) is a large genus of about 150 described species (Gilligan et al. 2019), with many additional undescribed species, that is widely distributed in the Palearctic, Nearctic, and Neotropical Regions. Unlike most genera of Cochylina, nearly all North American members of Aethes can be identified to genus by facies alone. The forewing typically has a white to cream ground color with one or more narrow, brown or golden fascia (often interrupted), a small triangular patch near the middle of the hind margin, and/or a brown dash from the base of the forewing; however, there are many exceptions. Razowski (1986b) listed the Neotropical species.

Both the male and female genitalia are fairly diverse morphologically (e.g., Sabourin et al. 2002), as would be expected for a large, widely distributed genus, but males can almost always be assigned to Aethes on the basis of a pair of slender, hooklike processes from the socii. However, these characteristic processes appear to be lost secondarily in a number of species that based on other characters, including barcodes (see Brown et al. 2019), fit convincingly in Aethes. Below I transfer one species to Aethes and describe a second, the latter the undescribed type species of Pogue’s (1986) manuscript genus Morta. Both species lack the sickle-shaped processes from the socii.