Raphidia margaritacea Fischer von Waldheim, 1834

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

Raphidia margaritacea Fischer von Waldheim

Raphidia margaritacea Fischer von Waldheim, 1834: 330. Holotype or syntypes: sex and depositary unknown. Type locality: Brazil

Notes.

This species was described by Fischer von Waldheim (1834) in his study about the Orthoptera and Neuroptera from Brazil. The description is very brief and not very informative and the type series is apparently lost, as shown by Ohl (2004). After the original description, the first paper to mention R. margaritacea was Hagen (1861), who synonymized it under Mantispa viridula Erichson , which was later followed by Hagen (1866), Berg (1899) and Penny (1977). Poivre (1982) transferred the species to the genus Entanoneura Enderlein without justification. In the revision of the Mantispidae from the Brazilian Amazon, Penny (1982) synonymized both M. viridula and R. margaritacea under Mantispa minuta (Fabricius) , now in Zeugomantispa . The synonymy of R. margaritacea under Z. minuta was followed by many subsequent authors ( Penny and Costa 1983; Carvalho and Corseuil 1995; Ohl 2004; Ardila-Camacho and García 2015; Ardila-Camacho et al. 2018) and it is the most accepted placement today ( Oswald 2024). The first species with which R. margaritacea was synonymized, M. viridula , is now considered a synonym of Z. virescens (Rambur) (see Ohl 2004 for more details).

Later, Machado and Rafael (2010) during their study of the Brazilian Mantispidae , noted that what was previously treated as M. minuta in the Brazilian fauna (sensu Penny 1982; Penny and Costa 1983; Carvalho and Corseuil 1995) was actually Z. virescens and not Z. minuta , based on the taxonomic arrangement proposed by Hoffman (2002). Despite being present in some neighboring countries, like Colombia and Venezuela, Z. minuta is still not recorded from Brazil ( Machado and Martins 2022).

In this sense, based on the fact that the type series of R. margaritacea is from Brazil, and that it was firstly synonymized under M. viridula , it makes sense to associate R. margaritacea with Z. virescens and not with Z. minuta . Furthermore, if this assumption is true, the oldest name of this species that would prevail would be R. margaritacea , and the current accepted name of this species would have to change. However, the lack of the type material of R. margaritacea makes it impossible to finally decide on the taxonomic status of this species. Since its original description is also quite uninformative, we are herein considering the species as a nomen dubium potentially in Zeugomantispa .