Mantispilla gillavryna Navás, 1926

Pires Machado, Renato Jose, Li, Hongyu & Ohl, Michael, 2025, Solving taxonomic and nomenclatural problems among the Neotropical species of the family Mantispidae (Insecta, Neuroptera), Deutsche Entomologische Zeitschrift 72 (1), pp. 57-83 : 57-83

Mantispilla gillavryna Navás

Mantispilla gillavryna Navás, 1926 b: 6 . Holotype: female ( CN). Type locality: Suriname: Paramaribo

Notes.

This species was described by Navás (1926 b) explicitly based on a female from Paramaribo, Suriname, and posteriorly mentioned again by the same author ( Navás 1929 b). Subsequently, the species was transferred to Mantispa by Penny (1977) which was accepted by Ohl (2004) but returned to Mantispilla by Snyman et al. (2018). The holotype was supposedly deposited in Navás’ collection but we could not get any information about it, strongly suggesting that it is probably lost. Based on the original description we can certainly assume that the species is related to Zeugomantispa , since it is mentioned that the specimen body is mostly green, including the wing venation and pterostigma. These characteristics clearly assigns M. gillavryna to Zeugomantispa , but it is not possible to unambiguously associate it with one of the three current valid species in the genus. The green color of the pterostigma can exclude Z. compellens (Walker, 1860) , which presents a red pterostigma, but it cannot exclude Z. minuta (Fabricius, 1775) nor Z. virescens ( Rambur, 1842) . The type locality of M. gillavryna also does not help, since both Z. minuta and Z. virescens potentially occur in Suriname. Since the type is not accessible, and since the original description is ambiguous, we propose to treat M. gillavryna as a nomen dubium.