Cacaohelea, Wirth & Grogan, 1988

Borkent, Art, 2024, The Phylogeny of the Genera of Biting Midges (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae) of the World, Zootaxa 5438 (1), pp. 1-274 : 226

Cacaohelea :

- Female abdomen with sternite 7 very short. Borkent & Picado (2008: character 7) described this feature, unique within the family. Some other Ceratopogonidae have sternite 7 somewhat shorter than either sternite 6 or 8 (e.g. Downeshelea , Bothamia , some Stilobezzia , Fanthamia , Bothahelea , Echinohelea ) but not to the degree present in Cacaohelea . Cacaohelea also has a large segment 8, with a ratio of sternite 8/7 of 5.0 or more. Others with a long sternite 8 have a maximum ratio of 3.5 (see character 135).

- Female with the medial portion of sternite 9 with enlarged, heavily sclerotized, ridged cuticle. This may be a partial reversal to the plesiomorphic condition in Ceratopogonidae (see character 140) but more likely is a distinctive, new modification.

- Female with one dark and one pale spermatheca. Most other Ceratopogonidae and Culicomorpha (other than extant Thaumaleidae ; the fossil Mesothaumalea fossilis Kovalev appears to have two pigmented spermathecae ( Kovalev 1989)) have darkly pigmented spermathecae, some genera of Ceratopogonidae have pale spermathecae (e.g. some Atrichopogon , some Stilobezzia ) but never in combination of dark and pale. The feature, therefore, is unique within the infraorder. However, it is important to recognize that numbers of genera in early lineages ( Table 4) have only one spermatheca and so cannot be adequately compared.