Document Type : Agricultural Entomology
Author
Abstract
During spring and summer of 2007, whilst collecting Chalcidoidea (Hymenoptera) in the North-western parts of Iran, I swept several specimens of Sycophila mellea (Curtis, 1831) from herbaceous plants. These materials were collected from Azarbaijan-e-Sharghi Province, Marand, Peyam. This species is an addition to the Iranian list of the family Eurytomidae and the genus Sycophila.It was hitherto known to occur in the Palearctic and Nearctic regions. The specimens were deposited in Hayk Mirzayans Insects Museum (HMIM) in Tehran. Previously four species of Sycophila (S. biguttata, S. binotata, S. submutica and S. variegata), had been recorded from Iran. It was found in the collected materials from northern provinces of Iran and it seems that S. mellea is a common species which in Iran.
Based on the literatures its chief host is Poaceae gall-maker eurytomids of the genus, Tetramesa. The combination of characters by which it can be distinguish from other species are given by Claridge (1959), Transactions of the Society for British Entomology 13: 149-168, Zerova (1995), Kiev, Ukraine, Naukova Dumka Publishers, and Lotfalizadeh & Gharali (2006), Zoology in the Middle East, 40: 77-84. The main distinctive characters are as follow: Pale species, black T-shaped marking in base of propodeum; submarginal band of forewing well developed but faded in discal area, marginal vein less than 3× as long as wide, stigmal vein longer than marginal vein, postmarginal vein wide partly fused with stigmal vein; pronotum about 1.5× as wide as long.
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