Mirax Haliday, 1833

Slater-Baker, Mollie-Rosae, Guzik, Michelle, Rodriguez, Juanita, Howe, Andy, Woodward, Alice, Ducker, Nathan & Fagan-Jeffries, Erinn, 2025, Three new species of Australian miracine parasitoid wasps collected by regional schools as part of the Insect Investigators citizen science project (Hymenoptera, Braconidae, Miracinae), Journal of Hymenoptera Research 98, pp. 19-45 : 19-45

Mirax Haliday, 1833

Mirax Haliday, 1834: 263 . See key references: Haliday 1834: 230; Haliday 1835: 467; Ashmead 1900: 131; Muesebeck 1922: 10; Papp 2013: 97. For full reference list up to 1973, see Shenefelt 1973: 676.

Centistidea Rowher, 1914: 81 . See key reference: van Achterberg and Mehrnejad 2002: 32. For full reference list up to 1973, see Shenefelt 1973: 676.

Type species.

Mirax rufilabris Haliday, 1833: 263 , description in Haliday 1834: 230

Remarks.

We treat Centistidea as a synonym of Mirax based on preliminary molecular tree reconstructions presented here and in Slater-Baker et al. (2022), as well as an observed continuous range of presence to absence of the propodeal medial longitudinal carina in Miracinae . No molecular data are available for specimens identified as the genus Rugosimirax , therefore, all specimens assigned to the genus Mirax in this study were morphologically diagnosed against Rugosimirax using the keys to the genera of Miracinae provided by Ranjith et al. (2023) and Liu and Polaszek (2024).

We acknowledge that the treatment of genera used in this study may require revision following improved understanding of the genera of Miracinae based on molecular data. We chose to take a conservative approach supported by the preliminary molecular results presented here and in previous work ( Slater-Baker et al. 2022), and focus on the goal of continued species-level documentation of Miracinae in Australia.