Male and female of Celonites abbreviatus tauricus Kostylev, 1935 are redescribed and a neotype is designated. Based on morphological characters Celonites a. tauricus is synonymized with Celonites spinosus Gusenleitner, 1966 and Celonites abbreviatus invitus Gusenleitner, 1973. The taxon is hypothesized to be reproductively isolated from Celonites abbreviatus Villers, 1789 by differences in the male genitalia and in the colour pattern of the male antennae and is therefore regarded as a separate biospecies named Celonites tauricus. Celonites tauricus is allopatrically distributed with regard to C. abbreviatus and has been recorded from the Crimea, Kos, Asia Minor and Cyprus. Within this range six intraspecific taxa can be separated by morphological characters and colour patterns. Habitat, flower association, flower visiting behaviour, mate seeking behaviour and nesting of C. tauricus are almost similar to C. abbreviatus.
KeywordsHymenoptera, Vespidae, Masarinae, Celonites, taxonomy, bionomics, Palaearctic, Crimea, Asia Minor, Cyprus, flower association, Lamiaceae, female brood care * Disclaimer: Author(s) from Crimea of articles appearing in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research is/are solely responsible for the proper indication of his/her/their actual postal address and affiliation. The Journal of Hymenoptera Research is a scientific journal and cannot be held responsible for political tensions or disputes between governments or persons.
RESEARCH ARTICLEVolker Mauss et al. / Journal of Hymenoptera Research 48: 33-66 (2016)
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IntroductionNearly 100 years ago the first specimen of a species of the pollen wasp genus Celonites Latreille, 1802 was recorded from the Crimea. It was a single female collected by V.N. Wuczeticz on 13 June 1916 on the southern slope of Karagach in the Karadag (Kostylev 1928; original spelling "Karagatsh") which is a small mountain massive on the south-eastern coast of the Crimea. Kostylev (1928) identified the specimen as Celonites abbreviatus (Villers, 1789). Seven years later he formally described the Celonites taxon from the Crimea as a new subspecies of C. abbreviatus named Celonites abbreviatus tauricus Kostylev, 1935. He noted that specimens from the Crimea differed from specimens from the Caucasus by finely serrate margins of the second and subsequent terga and concluded that they possibly belong to a different subspecies (Kostylev 1935). Kostylev did not designate any type specimens of the subspecies either in his original description or in any further publication. Moreover, it is unknown how many specimens were available to him, when he described the taxon. In his world checklist of masarine wasps Carpenter (2001) recognized C. a. tauricus as a valid taxon. He speculated that the holotype of C. a. tauricus might be in the collection of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg (Russia), but we could not find it there, though carefully searching for it. The holotypes of all other wasp species described by Kostylev are deposited in ...