Dicromantispa iridipennis (Guérin-Méneville)

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

Dicromantispa iridipennis (Guérin-Méneville)

Mantispa iridipennis Guérin-Méneville, 1844: 392. Holotype or syntypes: sex unknown, depository unknown. Type locality: Colombia

Notes.

The original description of this species is very brief and does not provide any information about the type material ( Guérin-Méneville 1844). However, only a few years after the original publication, the species was synonymized with M. gracilis Rambur by Westwood (1852). All subsequent studies followed this suggestion ( Walker 1853; Hagen 1861, 1866; Penny 1977) but some authors indicated that this synonymy is questionable ( Ohl 2004; Snyman et al. 2018; Tauber et al. 2019). As discussed above, M. gracilis Rambur is a junior primary homonym of M. gracilis Erichson , and for this reason, M. iridipennis was treated as a valid species by Ohl (2004), which was followed by Snyman et al. (2018). It was considered incertae sedis by Ardila-Camacho and García (2015).

Despite the fact that the type material of M. iridipennis is apparently lost, the available information suggests that the species is a synonym of M. gracilis Erichson. As mentioned before, every study that included M. iridipennis considered it as a synonym of M. gracilis Rambur , which by its turn was considered herein as a synonym of M. gracilis Erichson (see above). Furthermore, despite being very brief, the original description of M. iridipennis says that the body is brown, and the major veins of the wings are yellow, characters that match with M. gracilis Erichson. In fact, the yellow color of the veins is the major diagnostic character as proposed by Hoffman (2002) to separate D. gracilis (Erichson) when describing the genus Dicromantispa . In this sense, we are herein synonymizing Mantispa iridipennis Guérin-Méneville with Dicromantispa gracilis (Erichson) (new synonym).