Derotanypus Roback, 1971

Namayandeh, Armin, Hudson, Patrick L., Bogan, Daniel L. & Hudson, John P., 2024, Chironomidae (Diptera: Insecta) of Alaska, USA, with descriptions of new species and a checklist, Zootaxa 5511 (1), pp. 1-95 : 43

Derotanypus Roback, 1971

Derotanypus was established as a new genus by Roback (1971) with two species that had been known under various generic names. He also split the two species into separate subgenera. Later, Roback, in 1977, placed the genus as a subgenus of Psectrotanypus , because of similarities in morphological features of the larvae and pupae. The status of Derotanypus as a separate genus is now well established ( Cranston & Epler 2013). The genus is restricted to northern and montane regions of the Holarctic (Roback 1978), and most of the records from Alaska bear this out, except for collections from Prince Wales Island ( Roback 1971). The two species were common in tundra ponds near Barrow, with Derotanypus alaskensis ( Malloch, 1919) being more abundant than the Derotanypus aclines (Sublette, 1964) as noted in Bulter (1980a) and Lougheed et al. (2011). Notably, Roback (1977) also suggested that the specimens of D. aclines from Utqiagvik differed somewhat from those that Roback described in 1971 from the western United States. Roback (1971) reported D. alaskensis from Prince Wales Island, and we have found males from the Lena Point area near Juneau in late June. We also found two larvae in a tributary to the Totatlanika River between Denali National Park and Nenana in 2005 and Derotanypus larvae in three Arctic lakes near Utqiagvik, Wainwright, and Atqasuk in 2013 and 2014. Arctos (2023) has several references of larvae identified to genus from an unnamed lake in Central Alaska near the Alaskan/Canadian border. We found larvae of unknown species from an unnamed Arctic lake near Wainwright. The larvae of this genus are among the largest Tanypodinae found in North America (Roback 1978).