Thamnurgus caucasicus Reitter, 1887

Beaver, Roger A., Ghahari, Hassan & Sanguansub, Sunisa, 2016, An annotated checklist of Platypodinae and Scolytinae (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) from Iran, Zootaxa 4098 (3), pp. 401-441 : 407

Thamnurgus caucasicus Reitter, 1887

Distribution in Iran. Golestan ( Samin et al. 2011).

General distribution. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Georgia, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Western Russia.

Biology. There has been confusion regarding the hosts of this species. Earlier workers (e.g. Stark 1952, Pfeffer 1995) listed the hosts as species of Euphorbiaceae (Euphorbia) and Zygophyllaceae (Peganum) . However, Mandelshtam et al. (2012) have shown that the usual hosts are species of Carduus or Cirsium (Asteraceae) , and the species rarely occurs on other hosts. Thamnurgus is one of the few genera of Scolytinae which is herbivorous, attacking non-woody plants ( Kirkendall et al. 2015).