West Palaearctic species of the genus Eloeophila (Diptera: Limoniidae)

Abstract

Eloeophila Rondani, 1856 is a moderately large and widely distributed genus of the subfamily Limnophilinae, comprising 77 species-group taxa found throughout the Palaearctic, Nearctic, Afrotropical and Oriental regions (Oosterbroek, 2008). It has been less investigated because of its considerable infraspecific variability in wing pattern and uniformity in the structure of the male terminalia. Eleven Eloeophila species were known from the West Palaearctic. The taxonomy and distribution of most of them are well documented in the literature. Eloeophila albofascia (Alexander, 1975), from Iran, the only nonEuropean species of the eleven, is established here as a new junior synonym of E. apicata (Loew, 1871). Three species, E. czernyi (Strobl in Czerny & Strobl, 1909), E. laciniata (Edwards, 1928), and E. pusilla (Kuntze, 1920), which are little-known and have restricted ranges, are redescribed, and a lectotype of the latter is designated. In addition, ten new species are described, mostly from the south west Palaearctic. Some new characters are used to distinguish the species. Only male terminalia are considered and illustrated for all the species described. Females are associated with males based on external characters. A key to males of all West Palaearctic species is presented. The morphological terminology adopted here essentially follows McAlpine (1981), except that for the wing veins, which is that of Hennig (1954) (Fig. 29). Some special terms used in this paper are referred to in Fig. 2 and/or explained in the text. Unless otherwise stated, colours are described from dry-mounted specimens. Male terminalia were prepared by boiling in a solution of 10% KOH and preserved in glycerine in a sealed plastic tube pinned with the appropriate specimen. Line drawings were made using a drawing tube (camera lucida) attached to a compound microscope. Measurements were made using an ocular grid of the straight-line distance between the attachment of a wing and its tip and the longest perpendicular distance between the anterior and posterior margins of a wing. Photographs were taken with a digital