Euphyia vallantinaria was originally described as Cidaria vallantinaria from Bône, now Annaba, in eastern Algeria. For decades its generic placement drifted: Prout (1938) placed it between two species that today belong to the genus Catarhoe, and only the work of Hausmann (2011), Hausmann and Viidalepp (2012) and Müller et al. (2019) definitively assigned it to Euphyia, a genus of about 170 species distributed across the Holarctic and Neotropical regions. In Europe, six Euphyia species have been cited, of which four fly on the Iberian Peninsula: E. biangulata, E. vallantinaria, E. unangulata and E. frustata. Until now, however, only the female of E. vallantinaria had been diagnosed, and even that diagnosis was unsatisfying: the female genitalia were described as being without constant and significant differential features from the closely related E. biangulata.

The two males were collected by JM Gaona at Llanos del Juncal near Tarifa in the province of Cádiz, Andalusia, at 770 metres above sea level, on 4 September 2019. Both are deposited in the Research Collection of Animal Biology (RCBA-UMU) of the Universidad de Murcia. The adults were photographed with a Nikon D70 digital camera and z-stacked using the software Zerene, while the genital structures were studied with a Zeiss Stemi 508 stereomicroscope equipped with a Zeiss Axiocam ICc5 digital camera. Standard dissection procedures following Hausmann (2001) with minor modifications were used to expose the diagnostic genital morphology.

The male is smaller than the female, with a wingspan of 25.4 mm against 28–32 mm in females. The forewing shows a basal area divided by a brownish basal line, with a greenish area between the basal line and the antemedial line, and a costa with a slight reddish tinge. The medial area is dark olive green, with dark brown on the inner margin of the antemedial and postmedial lines, distally bearing a bidentate projection towards the termen in the central zone, some lobulation towards the anal margin and an angled insertion towards the costa. The postmedial fascia is narrow, with shadows of a dividing line, and the terminal area is less dark than in females, so the wavy line is less marked, with only slightly dark spots around it in and just below a subapical position. The hindwing is dark grey to brownish, with a barely contracted postmedial fascia.

The male genitalia match the genus characteristics well: the uncus is broad, rounded and dome-shaped; the sclerotised costa of the valva carries a dorsally bifurcated projection with two truncated tips, one narrower dorsally and one wider laterally; the valva apex is rounded, bent and with a slight dorso-subapical concavity; the sacculi bases are long and the saccus broad. The manica is spinose on a plate between the juxta and the distal part of the aedeagus, which during dissection may adhere to the aedeagus or remain adjacent to the juxta. The aedeagus is about 1.4 mm long, with a very small keel basally at the coecum and a lobulated vesica bearing a narrow elongated sclerotised plate with small spines basally. The tergum and sternum A8 are sclerotised into a continuous ring with a ventral sclerotised plate with a bilobed, wider tip. These characters differ from E. biangulata in the sub-triangular uncus, the forked dorsal projections of the costa that are more pointed at the tips, valvae that are straight dorsally without a dorsal cleft or subapical concavity, and a ventrally bilobous shape.

To confirm the identification genetically, two legs were removed from the two adult specimens and the 658 base-pair barcode segment of the mitochondrial COI gene (cytochrome c oxidase 1, 5′ terminus) was sequenced at the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding (CCDB) at the University of Guelph, using the high-throughput protocol of deWaard et al. (2008). The sequences are deposited in GenBank under accession numbers OK346331 and OK346332, and all voucher data, images, sequences and trace files are publicly available on the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD). The two males share identical barcode fragments, while a difference of two base pairs (0.3%) separates them from an earlier sequenced female from southern Spain.

The species carries a unique Barcode Index Number, BOLD:AAO2615, based on six specimens all with 658 bp sequences. Mean intraspecific variation is 0.26% and maximum intraspecific distance is 0.48%. The COI sequences reveal significant divergence from its nearest European congeners: mean K2P distances are 4.9% to E. unangulata (n = 20), 5.3% to E. biangulata (n = 17), 5.7% to E. frustata fulvocinctata (n = 4), 5.9% to E. mesembrina (n = 6) and 6.4% to E. adumbraria (n = 12). These figures are consistent with the 5.6% genetic distance from central European E. biangulata that Hausmann (2011) had already reported for Andalusian females, which at the time suggested separate species rank given also the more than 600 km gap between the southernmost distribution of E. biangulata and the new Andalusian populations.

Sequence divergences were calculated with the Kimura 2-parameter (K2P) model using the analytical tools of BOLD, and all new and related sequences were downloaded, aligned with the CLUSTAL algorithm of MEGA6 and compared with the BOLD identification engine, whose Geometridae reference database is continually validated by specialists as part of a global campaign to DNA barcode the roughly 24,000 species of the family. Neighbour Joining, Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Parsimony trees were constructed to visualise similarity among the selected European Euphyia species, with Epirrhoe sandosaria as outgroup. All three methods produced the same topology, so only the Neighbour Joining tree is presented. The authors caution that a single gene does not provide enough information to warrant a reliable phylogenetic analysis, so the trees illustrate similarity among the sequenced taxa rather than evolutionary relationships.

The barcoding results indicate two well-supported, reciprocally monophyletic groups among European Euphyia. One clade contains E. biangulata and E. vallantinaria, which differ from each other by 5.3%; the other consists of the Iberian subspecies E. frustata fulvocinctata and E. mesembrina, differing by 2.7%, while E. adumbraria does not cluster with E. unangulata and differs from the latter by 4.9%. Among the six European species, E. vallantinaria is closest to E. biangulata in both female and male genitalia, but differs externally in the narrower postmedial fascia of the forewing with shadows of a dividing line, the darker terminal area with a conspicuous wavy line in females, and the darker hindwing without a well-marked white postmedial fascia. Female genitalia are very similar among all European Euphyia species, while in males the shape of the sclerotised costa and juxta is diagnostic. E. vallantinaria can also be confused with Colostygia olivata, but the latter shows longer pectination of the male antennae and usually a wider medial area delimited by less straight lines.

Euphyia vallantinaria is a West-Mediterranean species, known from southern Andalusia and, in North Africa, only from the type locality Annaba and from El Tarf, both in Algeria, where six females from the Herbulot collection at the Zoologische Staatssammlung München were available for comparison. It is silvicolous in mountain areas, inhabiting deciduous and mixed forests, forest fringes, scrub and scattered Mediterranean evergreen oak forest from 300 to 1,200 metres above sea level. It is uni- or bivoltine, with scattered European records from early August to mid-September and North African records also in April. The larva remains unknown, as does that of no other European Euphyia except E. vallantinaria; the larvae of the other species are oligophagous, preferring Caryophyllaceae. Although the male is now described and illustrated for the first time, the authors note that the identification of the Andalusian populations would benefit from further DNA barcoding of North African specimens to complete the picture of this long-overlooked species.

Subject of Research: Zoology

Article Title: First description of the male and DNA barcode of Euphyia vallantinaria (Oberthür, 1890) from the Iberian Peninsula ( Lepidoptera , Geometridae , Larentiinae )

Article References: Guerrero, J. J., Hausmann, A., Rubio, R. M., Garre, M., & Ortiz, A. S. (2022). First description of the male and DNA barcode of Euphyia vallantinaria (Oberthür, 1890) from the Iberian Peninsula (Lepidoptera, Geometridae, Larentiinae). Nota Lepidopterologica, 45, 33-39. https://doi.org/10.3897/nl.45.75693

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/nl.45.75693

Keywords: Euphyia vallantinaria, Geometridae, Lepidoptera, DNA barcoding, COI gene, Iberian Peninsula, Andalusia, taxonomy, male genitalia, Nota Lepidopterologica, First, description