Doratura homophyla Flor, W. Wagner
Creators: name: Bückle, Christoph
name: Guglielmino, Adalgisa
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2022
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Arthropoda
Insecta
Hemiptera
Cicadellidae
Doratura
Doratura homophyla

description: Doratura homophyla (Flor, 1861)
(Figs 1A; 2M; 3E; 34E; 35A–F; 36A–E; 37A–E; 38A–D; 39A, B)
Jassus (Athysanus) homophylus Flor, 1861: 276
Athysanus homophylus Sahlberg, J., 1868: 215
Doratura homophyla Sahlberg, J., 1871: 293
Doratura homophyla var. littoralis Kuntze, 1937: 311 syn. nov.
Doratura littoralis Wagner, 1941: 61
Doratura (Doraturina) homophyla Emeljanov, 1964: 403
Diagnosis. The species is characterized by the testaceous aedeagus (Figs 37A–E) with two rows of teeth or spines prevalently in the apical half, and with a characteristic uneven curvature in lateral view. The aedeagus socle is flat and fused with the shaft which is therefore not flexibly articulated. The connective (Fig. 2M) is long with branched portion much longer than basal one; the oval bifurcation has widely separated branches. The pygofer (Fig. 3E) displays about four macrosetae dorso-caudally. The hind margin of the female pregenital sternite (Fig. 34E) is lobeshaped protruding. In most characters, the species resembles D. caucasica Melichar, 1913. It is distinguished from this species, however, by the shape of the apical part of aedeagus and by the prominent latero-caudal angle of its genital plates (Figs 39A, B).
Distribution (Figs 57, 61). The species is distributed almost throughout Europe, in Near East and in the Palearctic region until the Altai region, Mongolia and China.
We examined material from Albania, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iraq, Iran, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania, Russia: European part, Spain, Turkey: Adana, Ukraine. In addition, there are records for Armenia (Lindberg, 1960); Belarus (Borodin, 2004); Belgium (Van Stalle, 1989); China: Xinjiang (Duan & Zhang, 2012); Denmark (Ossiannilsson, 1983); Estonia (Söderman, et al., 2009); Finland (Ossiannilsson, 1983); France (Ribaut, 1952); Georgia (Dlabola, 1958); Kyrgyzstan (Dubovsky & Turgunov, 1971); Israel (Linnavuori, 1962); Latvia (Vilbaste, 1974); Lithuania (Vilbaste, 1974); Luxembourg (Niedringhaus et al., 2010); Moldova (Nast, 1987); Mongolia (Dlabola, 1970); Netherlands (Reclaire, 1944); Poland (Dworakowska, 1968); Portugal (Quartau & Duarte Rodrigues, 1969); Russia: European part, Altai Mts., Yakutia, West Siberia, Maritime Territory (Anufriev & Emeljanov, 1988), Dagestan (Dlabola, 1961); Serbia (Horváth, 1903a); Slovakia (Dlabola, 1954); Sweden (Ossiannilsson, 1983); Turkey: Anatolia (Kalkandelen, 1974), Black Sea (Zeybekoğlu, 1998); Uzbekistan (Dubovsky, 1965).
In Italy, Servadei (1967) records the species from Lombardy, Trentino-Alto Adige, and Tuscany. The record from Trentino-Alto Adige refers to Cobelli’s old record (1904), which needs confirmation. We found only one specimen (from Tuscany) in the Servadei collection with a label “ D. homophyla ”, which, however, proved to be Doratura paludosa Horváth. The presence of D. homophyla in Italy should be confirmed, all records until now are highly doubtful. We ourselves never collected the species in Italy. However, as it occurs in Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary and former Yugoslavia, its presence at least in northern Italy is possible.
Ecology. Agrostis capillaris, and species of several other Poaceae genera are recorded as host plants (Nickel 2003). The species is found mostly on lowland places, and sandy or steppic habitats. In the southern regions it occurs in mountain areas as well, until an altitude of about 1000 m.
Phenology. Nickel (2003) records for the species a bivoltine life cycle with adults from May to October.Adults in our material were collected from the beginning of June until the middle of September.
Taxonomic remarks. D. littoralis Kuntze was described (as forma littoralis of D. homophyla) from dunes on the coast of the Baltic Sea in Germany (Mecklenburg). The author indicates larger size (body length of females 6 mm), light coloration with largely obliterated markings, slight differences in the aedeagus shape, and a styles morphology near to D. impudica as diagnostic characters. He suggests Ammophila arenaria as host plant and considers the species halophilous.
Wagner (1941), who had similar material collected on the coast of the Baltic Sea in Holstein (Hohwacht), raised this taxon to the level of a species. He records three females of this taxon from Bellinchen (now Bielinek in Poland), i. e. a locality quite distant from the coast. In 1968, Dworakowska dedicates a paragraph in her study on the Doratura taxa in Poland to D. littoralis. Unfortunately, she had only one male and one female specimen available for a comparison with D. homophyla. She indicates 5.67 mm as body length of the female. All in all, she confirms the diagnostic characters indicated by Kuntze. She mentions the large size, different proportion of the length of eighth and ninth abdominal tergite, the light coloration, the differences in the bending of the aedeagus, the lateral direction of its apical teeth, and the slenderer and longer styles with curved apex. Nevertheless, the style of D. littoralis figured in the same article, displays clearly more affinity to D. homophyla than to D. impudica. Besides the records for Germany and Poland, the species was recorded later also from the Netherlands (Reclaire 1944) and from Latvia (Söderman et al., 2009).
We studied two females of Wagner’s material from Holstein (Hohwacht; Fig. 36E) and ten Doratura specimens (five males and five females) collected by H. Nickel (together with D. impudica specimens) on the island of Poel in Mecklenburg (Figs 36A–D) not far from the type locality of D. littoralis. The characters of their genital apparatus (Figs 37A, 38A) display no significant differences to the corresponding structures in D. homophyla specimens from Southern Germany and Hungary. The coloration is generally light, but a similar light coloration may be observed among D. homophyla specimens from several countries too (e.g. in some specimens from saline localities in Austria), even though somewhat darker specimens are prevailing. The markings on abdomen, pronotum, vertex and face are quite variable, generally not very extended. The size is highly variable, for instance the largest female has a length of 5.2 mm, the smallest one only 4.3 mm (the two females deposited in the Wagner collection as D. littoralis have a body length of about 5.0 mm; D. homophyla females in our material range between 4.0 and 5.05 mm, mean value 4.55 mm). On average, the specimens from the Baltic Sea are somewhat larger than the measured D. homophyla specimens from other regions (width of vertex, lengths of wings, length of tibia III). Thus, differences between both groups do not concern the genital morphology, but merely (and only to a low degree, and not in all cases) size and coloration. In some cases, we observed light coloration particularly at localities on the coast also in species of other genera, for instance in Neophilaenus lineatus (L., 1758) or Psammotettix confinis (Dahlbom, 1850). Considering all this, we establish the synonymy of D. littoralis with D. homophyla.
description: Published as part of Bückle, Christoph & Guglielmino, Adalgisa, 2022, Revision of the genus Doratura Sahlberg (Hemiptera, Cicadellidae, Deltocephalinae) with particular regard to its distribution in Italy and description of four new species, pp. 1-116 in Zootaxa 5112 (1) on pages 49-51, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5112.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/6340589