Diplodoma adspersella Heinemann, 1870

Cava, Sara La, Rijllo, Giuseppe, Zucco, Giada & Scalercio, Stefano, 2025, Revisiting the genus Diplodoma Zeller, 1852 in Europe: DNA barcoding reveals the presence of an undescribed species from forested habitats of southern Italy (Lepidoptera: Psychidae), Zootaxa 5583 (2), pp. 371-382 : 378

Diplodoma adspersella Heinemann, 1870 syn. nov.

DNA barcoding analyses we carried out, highlighted a high COI diversification of Diplodoma laichartingella and D. adspersella without a clear separation between them. In the Neighbour-Joining tree of European Diplodoma ( Fig. 20 ), D. adspersella and D. laichartingella present in BOLD and identified by the authors on the basis of morphology, are not coherently separated by barcoding. One Slovenian specimen, that refers to a larva and its case, was morphologically identified as D. adspersella and included in a BIN (BOLD:AAP9669) together with Slovenian and Austrian D. laichartingella specimens identified using wing pattern. In other two cases the name D. adspersella has been attributed by wing patterns to all the specimens composing the BINs, but these BINs are intermixed with those of D. laichartingella , making a mtDNA-based differentiation of these taxa unlikely. In light of our genetic analyses, that further weaken the validity of D. adspersella questioned by several authors due to the lack of morphological differences, we propose Diplodoma adspersella Heinemann, 1870 as a junior synonym of Diplodoma laichartingella (Goeze, 1783) .

Figures

FIGURE 20. Neighbour-joining tree derived from sequences of Diplodoma specimens available in BOLD. Scale bar indicates a phylogenetic distance of 0.02 nucleotide substitutions per site. Numbers on the branches indicate bootstrap percentage after 500 replications in constructing the tree.