A new species of Brachycerocoris Costa (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Pentatomidae: Podopinae) from the Philippines

Authors

Joseph E. Eger Jr., Florida State Collection of Arthropods,Follow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2-23-2022

Citation

Eger JE. 2022. A new species of Brachycerocoris Costa (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Pentatomidae: Podopinae) from the Philippines. Insecta Mundi 0910: 1–6.

Comments

Copyright held by the author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons, Attribution Non-Commercial License Published on February 24, 2022 by Center for Systematic Entomology, Inc. P.O. Box 141874 Gainesville, FL 32614-1874 USA http://centerforsystematicentomology.org/

Abstract

A new species, Brachycerocoris woodruffi Eger, is described from Mindanao Island, Philippines. The new species is described, illustrated and compared to the two other species of Brachycerocoris Costa occurring in the Philippines, B. dromedarius (Vollenhoven) and B. davidii Roca-Cusachs and Salini.

Brachycerocoris Costa belongs to the Brachycerocoris group of the Podopinae (Rider et al. 2018) and is represented in Africa by three species, B. afer Stål 1876, B. congoanus Schouteden 1905, and B. patrizii Mancini 1939. The genus has historically contained just two species in the Oriental region, B. camelus Costa 1863, described from China, and B. dromedarius (Vollenhoven 1863), described from Tondano, Sulawesi. Distant (1902) added Sri Lanka to the distribution of B. camelus and provided a description and illustration. Subsequent authors reported B. camelus from the Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu (Ramachandra Rao 1920; Chatterjee 1934; Chandra 1953; Schaefer 1997), while Rider and Zheng (2005) added to the known distribution of B. camelus in China. Schaefer et al. (1996) provided descriptions and illustrations of the two Oriental species known at that time, adding Mindoro, Philippines to the distribution of B. dromedarius. Salini and Roca-Cusachs (2021) recently reviewed the genus in the Oriental region and described two new species, B. davidii Roca-Cusachs and Salini from Mindanao, Philippines and B. petrii Salini and Roca-Cusachs from Karnataka State, India. They also reported B. dromedarius from Luzon, Philippines and Sumba Island, Indonesia and suggested that the records of B. camelus from India and Sri Lanka may actually refer to B. petrii. While examining Philippine material in the University of Georgia Collection of Arthropods in Athens, GA, USA, I encountered several specimens of Brachycerocoris from the Philippines, including a single specimen of an apparently undescribed species with a distinctive pygophore. This species is here described, illustrated, and compared to other Philippine species of the genus.