Southern hemisphere distributional patterns in plant bugs (Hemiptera:Miridae:Phylinae): Xiphoidellus, gen. nov. from Australia and Ampimpacoris, gen. nov. from Argentina, show transantarctic relationships

Abstract

Transantarctic distributional patterns are common in many groups of insects and plants including Coleorrhyncha, the sister group of Heteroptera. In contrast, evidence for such patterns within Heteroptera, or true bugs, is rare. We here describe two new genera of Phylini (Miridae : Phylinae) – Xiphoidellus, gen. nov. from Australia with six included species, and the monotypic Ampimpacoris, gen. nov. from Argentina. Xiphoidellus shows relationships to taxa in New Zealand and southern South America. Two sets of cladistic analyses, using equal and implied weights approaches, analyse relationships of the seven new species and 19 or 29 additional phyline taxa using 54 and 45 morphological characters, respectively. Both analyses support the New Zealand endemic genus Xiphoides Eyles & Schuh as the sister group to the Australian Xiphoidellus; Araucanophylus pacificus Carvalho from Chile is the sister taxon to the Xiphoides + Xiphoidellus clade. Affinities of the monotypic genus Ampimpacoris, gen. nov. are less clear cut and may be with a clade of Australian plant bugs or a Nearctic taxon. A primary Brooks parsimony analysis, based on one of the tree topologies, resulted in an area cladogram that proposes a close relationship between Australia and New Zealand, with southern South America being the sister to that area. This pattern differs from the classical vicariance pattern reported for many groups of insects, but is consistent with the ‘southern pattern’ frequently observed in plants.