Enicospilus ramidulus (Linnaeus, 1758) Figure 39

Ichneumon ramidulus Linnaeus, 1758: 566; HT, sex and locality unknown, not examined.

Specimens examined.

Total of 144 specimens (93♀♀50♂♂ and 1 unsexed): England (4♀♀1♂), Germany (1♀), Italy (1♀), Japan (71♀♀47♂♂ and 1 unsexed), Korea (1♀), Mallorca (6♀♀), Russia (1♀), Scotland (1♀), Spain (1♀), Sweden (2♀♀1♂), Switzerland (1♂), unknown (4♀♀).

Distribution.

Afrotropical, Oriental, and trans-Palaearctic regions (Yu et al. 2016); this is a predominantly Palaearctic species and may be restricted to there, i.e., all reliable distribution records have been only from the Palaearctic region. Enicospilus ramidulus is one of the most frequently encountered Enicospilus species throughout the Palaearctic.

JAPAN: [ Hokkaidô] (Uchida 1928; Hori et al. 2009; present study); [ Tôhoku] Aomori* and Fukushima*; [Hokuriku] Niigata (Ohmori 1960; present study), Toyama*, Ishikawa*, and Fukui*; [ Kantô-Kôshin] Ibaraki*, Tochigi*, Nagano (Uchida 1928; present study), Saitama*, Tôkyô (Konishi et al. 2014; present study), and Kanagawa (Kawashima et al. 2018; present study); [ Tôkai] Shizuoka* and Mie*; [Kinki] Kyôto (Chiu 1954; Iwata 1960), Ōsaka *, Hyôgo (Iwata 1958, 1960; present study), Nara (Iwata 1960), and Wakayama*; [ Chûgoku] Shimane (Konishi and Nakamura 2000, 2002; present study) and Hiroshima (Konishi and Nakamura 2000, 2002, 2005, 2010; present study); [Shikoku] Kagawa (Iwata 1960) and Ehime (Konishi and Yamamoto 2000); [ Kyûshû] Fukuoka* and Kumamoto*. *New records.

Bionomics.

Recorded from a wide variety of hosts, but some records are undoubtedly the result of misidentifications of the ichneumonid. Reliable rearings are from species of Noctuidae, particularly the subfamily Hadeninae (Broad and Shaw 2016).

Differential diagnosis.

This species is sometimes confused with E. melanocarpus but is easily distinguishable (cf. Differential diagnosis of E. melanocarpus). Some species have similarly shaped fore wing sclerites, but E. ramidulus can be distinguished by many characters, for example, the wider face (Fig. 39B), black posterior segments of the metasoma (Fig. 39A), and entirely moderately punctate meso- and metapleuron (Fig. 39E). Some other Japanese species share a similar colour pattern (i.e., body entirely testaceous except for black posterior segments of the metasoma, as in Figs 28A, 42A, 53A) as E. ramidulus (Fig. 39A); these species can be separated from each other using the summarised characters in Table 8.