Lebia Latreille, 1802

Baehr, Martin & Reid, Chris A. M., 2017, On a Collection of Carabidae from Timor Leste, with Descriptions of Nine New Species (Insecta: Coleoptera, Carabidae), Records of the Australian Museum 69 (6), pp. 421-450 : 441-442

Lebia Latreille, 1802

Lebia Latreille, 1802 : Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des crustacés et des insectes. Ouvrage faisant suite à l’histoire naturelle générale et particulière, composée par Leclerc de Buffon, et rédigée par C. S. Sonnini, membre de plusieurs sociétés savantes. Familles naturelles des genres. Tome troisième: 85. Type species: Carabus haemorrhoidalis Fabricius, 1792 (= Buprestis marginatus Geoffroy in Fourcroy, 1785), by subsequent designation (Andrewes, 1935).

The very large genus Lebia (s. l.) is distributed worldwide with a large number of species described from the Oriental region.Authors differ in how the genus should be subdivided, or, whether it should be retained as a single genus. However, this is a matter of opinion about the supraspecific hierarchY which will not be discussed herein in detail.

Unfortunately no general revision of the Oriental species of the genus Lebia is available, because the paper of Jedlicka (1963) includes only a part of the then described species and, moreover, does not use genitalic characters for characterization and differentiation of the species; and the key in Habu (1967) covers only the Japanese species.

The matter has recently been made worse, because Kirschenhofer in a couple of papers (e.g., Kirschenhofer, 2009a,b) described various, mostly very similar, species from the Oriental Region, either from single females, or if males are involved, without describing or figuring the internal structures of the aedeagus which in many Lebia are very characteristic and complex, because the internal sac may bear variously shaped and located teeth, spines, or spinose plates. This taxonomic procedure does not really improve our knowledge and renders work on this genus rather more difficult.

Therefore, unfortunately, the internal structures of the male genitalia of almost no Oriental Lebia have been examined, which makes identification of species difficult. Sorting of species only using body size, shape, and colour pattern as differentiating characters is compromized bY the presence of several very similarly shaped and coloured species, and also infraspecific variation in some widelY ranging species.

The Papuan species have been keyed by Darlington (1968) in his monumental treatise of the New Guinean Carabidae , and the species of the Australian and Papuan Regions were recently revised by Baehr (2004a), who added several species in a number of supplementary papers, of which that from 2012 ( Baehr, 2012c) for the present paper is most important.