Aciandrena Warncke, 1968

Wood, Thomas James, 2023, Revisions to the Andrena fauna of north-western Africa with a focus on Morocco (Hymenoptera: Andrenidae), European Journal of Taxonomy 916 (1), pp. 1-85 : 4

Subgenus Aciandrena Warncke, 1968

The subgenus Aciandrena is species-rich and contains a swarm of poorly-understood or undescribed diversity in dry desert and Mediterranean environments in North Africa and the Middle East. Females are often inseparable, and genetic analyses or the usually distinctive male genital capsules are typically required to define species boundaries (e.g., Wood et al. 2020; Pisanty et al. 2022a). Moreover, the subgenus Aciandrena sensu Warncke is polyphyletic and contains multiple lineages ( Pisanty et al. 2022b). This can be seen to a certain extent with COI analysis ( Fig. 1 ), although COI analysis has limited power to resolve deeper phylogenetic relationships ( Trunz et al. 2016, though see also Talavera et al. 2022). At the present time, it is not clear how to effectively differentiate these lineages, and so a broad Aciandrena concept is adopted here. A specimen from high altitude in the Middle Atlas generated a sequence that is closest to two eastern species, A. curviocciput Pisanty & Wood, 2022 (12.77%; Israel, Lebanon, Turkey) and A. israelica Scheuchl & Pisanty, 2016 (13.03%, range 12.64–13.42%; Turkey, Syria, Israel and the West Bank, Jordan). The species is also morphologically distinct from these comparison species, and it is described below as Andrena ifranensis sp. nov.

Figures

Fig. 1. Phylogenetic tree (maximum likelihood) of Andrena subgenus Aciandrena Warncke, 1968 based on the mitochondrial COI gene. Numbers adjacent to branches represent bootstrap support (values of <75 are omitted). Species belonging to the subgenus Graecandrena Warncke, 1968 are marked in different shades of blue, and species belonging to the subgenus Parandrenella Popov, 1958 are marked in grey.