Status and redescription of the South American pest species Agrotis robusta (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae): a history of misidentifications

Abstract

Agrotis robusta (Blanchard, 1852) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) is a species of economic importance in South America. This species is considered a pest on seedlings of several crops. Agrotis robusta is commonly confused with and treated as A. malefida Guenée in Boisduval and Guenée, 1852, and only a couple of works cite A. robusta for South America and none mention it as a species of economic importance. The aim of this work is to redescribe and illustrate the adult and male and female genitalia of A. robusta, and to provide an identification key to closely related pest species in South America with which A. robusta has been confused. Four new synonymies with A.

Molecular characterization and phylogenetic assessment of agricultural-related noctuids (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) of South America

“…Our findings in Agrotis support the latest morphological studies which recovered Agrotis as a monophyletic group (San Blas, 2015). Furthermore, our result is congruent with systematic studies which considered A. malefida and A. robusta as different species (San Blas, 2014, 2015San Blas and Barrionuevo, 2013), the former sister to A. canities, both closely related by morphology (San Blas, 2014, 2015, and A. ipsilon sister to A. infusa, a close relationship already noticed by Common (1958) due to their morphological similarity.…”

“…Despite their economic importance, many species were incorrectly identified for decades. Recent systematic studies helped to solve identity problems within genera of economic importance in South America such as Agrotis Ochsenheimer (San Blas, 2014, 2015San Blas and Barrionuevo, 2013), Feltia Walker (Dias et al, 2017(Dias et al, , 2018San Blas and Agrain, 2017;San Blas et al, 2019), Leucania Ochsenheimer (Cocco et al, 2019;Dolibaina et al, 2019), and Spodoptera Guenée (Brito et al, 2019). Except for Brito et al (2019), all these studies were based exclusively on adult morphology.…”

A scientific note of pest-insects associated with stingless bee hive Melipona eburnea in the Ecuadorian Amazon Region

“…Another organism found in the colony was a Lepidoptera: Noctuidae (larva) (Figure 1, C), with almost 300 species around the world being considered as pests to crop in the majority of cases 18 . However, there is no information about Lepidoptera found in the colony of stingless bees or honeybee of the Apis genus.…”

DNA Barcoding of fogged caterpillars in Peru: A novel approach for unveiling host-plant relationships of tropical moths (Insecta, Lepidoptera)

“…Apart from the aforementioned programs only few original data are published for host-plant relationships of Lepidoptera and much of the work focused on caterpillars found on plants of economic importance (pests and potential pests) (e.g. [6], [7], [8]).…”