Patula timandra Hutton, 1883

Brook, Fred J., Kennedy, Martyn, King, Tania M., Ridden, Johnathon, Shaw, Matthew D. & Spencer, Hamish G., 2020, Catalogue of New Zealand land, freshwater and estuarine molluscan taxa named by Frederick Wollaston Hutton between 1879 and 1904, Zootaxa 4865 (1), pp. 1-73 : 38-39

Patula timandra Hutton, 1883

Hutton, 1883. The New Zealand Journal of Science, 1: 475.

Type material. Syntypes (2), CMNZ M40 , formerly present in Canterbury Museum, Christchurch , but not found by Freeman et al. (1997: 37), or during a search of the CMNZ molluscan collection in 2017, and apparently lost.

CMNZ molluscan catalogue details. M40—‘ Patula timandra Hutton , = tau, Auckland (2 specimens) (old No. 67) ’.

Type locality. ‘ Auckland (Gillies)’ ( Hutton 1883g: 475), ‘ Auckland (Cheeseman)’ ( Hutton 1884b: 175).

Previous illustrations of type material. Shell illustrated by Pilsbry (1892 [in 1892–1893]: pl. 24, fig. 21, ‘H. Suter, del.’), and by Suter (1894a: pl. 15, fig. 13), probably from the type series, as noted below.

Remarks. Hutton submitted a description of this species to the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute issue for 1883, but publication was delayed until May 1884 ( Hutton 1884b: 175), and was preempted by a brief description in an account of a meeting of the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury ( Hutton 1883g: 475). There has been confusion over the identity and distribution of Patula timandra : it was treated a valid species by Hutton (1884c: 192), Pilsbry (1892 [in 1892–1893]: 84) and Suter (1894a: 128, 1894b: 258); and was incorrectly listed as a junior synonym of Helix varicosa Pfeiffer, 1853 [= H. varicosa Reeve, 1852 ] by Suter (1892e: 293), Hedley & Suter (1893: 651), Climo (1969: 201), Powell (1979: 306), Marshall (1995: 498), and Freeman et al. (1997: 37); and as a junior synonym of Helix tau Pfeiffer, 1861 by Murdoch (1899: 321) and Suter (1913: 687). Pilsbry (1892 [in 1892–1893]) included three figures of putative P. timandra , one of which was drawn by Henry Suter (pl. 24, fig. 21), and the other two by Pilsbry himself (pl. 24, figs. 22, 23), as indicated in the figure captions (p. 304). The illustration by Suter was probably based on a specimen from the type series in the Canterbury Museum (see Hyde 2017: 102), whereas the shell(s) drawn by Pilsbry was probably from a (mixed?) lot of three specimens that, according to ANSP catalogue details, had been collected in the South Island, New Zealand, by Suter (i.e., ANSP 63797). The illustration of Pilsbry (1892 [in 1892–1893]: pl. 24, figs. 21) shows that timandra has three apertural lamellae, as does an illustration and accompanying description by Suter (1894a: 128, pl. 15, fig. 13), indicating that this species belongs in the genus Fectola Iredale, 1915 , though Climo (1978a) did not mention it in his taxonomic review of this genus-group. Nine valid species of Fectola are known from New Zealand, two of which, F. infecta (Reeve, 1852) and F. tau (Pfeiffer, 1861) [= F. trilamellata Climo, 1978 ] have three apertural lamellae arranged like those in Pilsbry’s and Suter’s illustrations ( Climo 1978a, 1989; Brook & Ablett 2019). The description by Hutton (1884b: 175) of a shell with a flat or slightly convex spire, the number and arrangement of apertural lamellae shown in Suter’s illustration of putative type material (Pilsbry 1892 [in 1892–1893]: pl. 24, fig. 21), and the fact that this species was described from material collected at Auckland, indicates that Patula timandra Hutton, 1883 is probably conspecific with Fectola infecta (Reeve, 1852) . The latter species is widely distributed in the northern North Island from Houhora south to Taranaki, Ruapehu and Hawke’s Bay ( Climo 1978a: fig. 3; 1989: fig. 3; AIM and NMNZ collection records). We have not examined the specimen of ‘ Patula timandra ’ that was illustrated by Pilsbry (1892 [in 1892–1893]: pl. 24, fig. 22), but if the locality details for ANSP 63797 mentioned above are correct we expect that it would prove to be F. tau , which has a distribution spanning the northern South Island and southern North Island according to Climo (1978a, 1989 —as F. trilamellata ).

Taxonomy. Patula timandra Hutton, 1883 is treated here as a subjective junior synonym of Fectola infecta (Reeve, 1852) N. syn.