Pityococcus cf ferrisi adult male, dorsal - Pityococcus -

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I shook this bug from the terminal branchs of a pinyon tree (Pinus edulis) on the southwest corner of James St. & General Patch St. NE ((Alameda 7.5’ quadrangle), Albuquerque, Bernalillo Co., NM. It occured concurrently with the female linked below, with both in significant numbers. It also occurred concurrently with both males and females of NM Pinyon Needle Scale.

This specimen was chemically treated with acetone and thermally inflated, as described here to prevent its thorax from shrivelling upon desiccation.

I sent samples of the male and female in ETOH to Ian Stocks. He made slides and determined them to be Pityococcus cf ferrisi, based on McKenzie 1942(1). These are the first reported pictures of a male from this genus. The "cf" means the genus designation is good, but there is some doubt about the species. I did not know this originally and moved it to P. ferrisi initially. McKenzie reports P. ferrisi has been collected near Gallup NM (140 miles west of Albuquerue), but Ian explains:

"I'll need to look at some more of the specimens you sent earlier - it is probably ferrisi, but a problem is that our IDs can be only as good as the taxonomy, which still needs work. I've been reworking and collating all taxonomic literature on these groups since Herbert, 1919, and still need to critically compare the specimens against Gill 1993 illustration of deleoni; as far as I can tell, that is the only illustration."

This image is from a CombineZP processed stack of 180 images with a 5.6 µm step taken with a Mitutoyo M Plan APO 10X/0.28 ∞/0 mm microscope objective + Nikon 135 mm F2.8 AIS telephoto lens + Nikon D300 camera (magnification 6.75×; technique described here).

Female: