Nola cucullatella (Linnaeus, 1758)

Marabuto, Eduardo, 2022, Spialia rosae Hernández-Roldán, DApporto, Dincă, Vicente & VilA, 2016, and 17 moth species new for the fauna of Portugal (Insecta: Lepidoptera), Arquivos Entomolóxicos 25, pp. 305-322 : 312

18. Nola cucullatella (Linnaeus, 1758)

— Tourém, Montalegre, Vila Real. 860 m a.s.l. MGRS: 29TNG9139. 16.VIII.2016. Eduardo Marabuto leg. On a lit window. Gen. det.

A West-Palaearctic species with a wide European distribution which is replaced by sister species Nola tutulella Zerny, 1927 in the southern Atlanto-Mediterranean region, particularly in southern Iberia and North Africa ( Hacker et al., 2012). The two species have a very similar habitus and likely have been extensively misidentified in the past and the contact zone is still not well known. In fact, most of the Iberian knowledge of these two species still comes from Vives Moreno (1990), who while revising the species group in the region, defined a distribution later replicated by Fibiger et al. (2009) and Hacker et al. (2012). Accordingly, all old records of N. cucullatella from Portugal, which come from the southern half of the country, were transferred to N. tutulella by Vives Moreno (1990). In nearby Spain, the species is known at least from León and Burgos in Castilla y León ( Magro & Jambrina Pérez, 2015), but may be being repeatedly confused with N. tutulella in Cáceres (Blázquez Caselles, 2014).

Here, the species is reinstated as occurring in Portugal upon a worn specimen whose diagnosis was confirmed through dissection and ecological setting of its locality. In spite of no known occurrences in Galicia, the species is likely present in this Spanish region.