Tituboea decemguttata Walker, 1871

Bezděk, Jan, 2018, Contribution to the knowledge of the Clytrini of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Near East and the Arabian Peninsula, with descriptions of four new species (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae: Cryptocephalinae), European Journal of Taxonomy 481, pp. 1-37 : 11

Tituboea decemguttata Walker, 1871 , nomen dubium

Tituboea decemguttata Walker, 1871: 18 (original description).

Material examined

Type material not examined.

Type locality

EGYPT: Cairo.

Comments

Tituboea decemguttata Walker, 1871 was described from Cairo, Egypt ( Walker 1871). Unfortunately, the collection of John Keast Lord, which included Walker’s type material from his 1871 paper, was destroyed ( Horn et al. 1990). As mentioned by Bezděk & Batelka (2011), no specimens were found in the institutions housing parts of Walker’s collection: The Natural History Museum (London), University Museum of Natural History (Oxford), and Museum Victoria (Melbourne). The original description of Tituboea decemguttata is uninformative, predominantly based on colour characters, which are highly variable in the species of Tituboea .

Over the last 40 years, Tituboea decemguttata was published from various countries of the Near East and the Arabian Peninsula ( Medvedev 1979, 1996; Katbeh-Bader & Medvedev 2000; Lopatin et al. 2003). Regalin & Medvedev (2010b) summarised the distribution as follows: Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. However, almost all the specimens identified as Tituboea decemguttata which I have examined in various collections proved to be Tituboea lacordairei (Pic, 1929) .

Due to the loss of the type material and the uninformative description, I cannot resolve the species’ identity with certainty. It cannot be excluded that the original type specimen(s) really were conspecific with Tituboea lacordairei because the westernmost known locality of Tituboea lacordairei is in the Sinai Peninsula ( Bezděk & Regalin 2015), relatively near to Cairo. However, Tituboea decemguttata may also be conspecific with another species of Tituboea , for example Tituboea arabica (Olivier, 1808) or Tituboea olivieri ( Lacordaire, 1848) . Unfortunately I have seen no specimens from Egypt with a colouration as described in the original description, which could be used for neotype designation. At present, the best course of action seems to me to consider Tituboea decemguttata as a nomen dubium.