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Photo#588745
Asindulum

Asindulum
Chibougamau, Nord-du-Québec County, Quebec, Canada
August 12, 2011
This pic didn't turn out as good as it seemed, but still, it's a very good close-up of an Asindulum species. There's only two species in the Nearctic to my knowledge, but I'm not able to discriminate them. I know A. montanum can be found in New England, which is, while very far away from this town, still a Northeastern location; on the other hand, A. tenuipes is, according to Evenhuis' Catalog of Keroplatidae of the World, only known from Quebec; not only that, but the type locality is "Hudson's Bay", which is not that far away from this town.

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Asindulum Asindulum

Old key
If this is a described species it can be identified using Johannsen 1910.

 
Unfortunately, Johannsen didn
Unfortunately, Johannsen didn't include Asindulum tenuipes in his 1910 publication. He lists three species, one of which (A. montanum) is considered valid in Evenhuis's catalog, and the other two are placed in Macrorrhyncha (M. coxalis and M. flava). I'm afraid that there is no good reference for distinguishing A. tenuipes from A. montanum.

I have therefore gone to the original description (Walker 1848), which gives the abdomen as "gray, somewhat paler on the hind border of each segment, and having a yellow stripe on each side". This doesn't seem to match the photograph. Johannsen (1910) says the first three abdominal segments of A. montanum are black, the rest yellow, so it matches this description more closely. I would hesitate to call it anything other than Asindulum sp. without reference to the type, though. There are undoubtedly more than two species in North America, and Walker was notoriously bad at describing species.

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