Shun-Ichi UENO and German Sh. LAFER
A New Anophthalmic Trechiama (Coleoptera, Trechinae) from Central Hokkaido, Northeast Japan.
Elytra, Tokyo, 20 (2): 137-143, Nov. 15, 1992
Abstract.
A new anophthalmic species of the trechine genus Trechiama is described
from the southern part of the Sorachi Hills in central Hokkaido, Northeast Japan, under
the name of T. kuznetsovi. It belongs to the group of T. borealis, and is mainly characterized by the peculiarly shaped pronotum with at least a pair of discal setae and the
unique conformation of male genitalia.
Since the trechine fauna of the Hidaka and the Yubari Mountain Ranges in central
Hokkaido was dealt with by the senior author in 1971, nothing has been added to our
knowledge about the Trechiama species occurring in this northern island of Japan. It is true
that a strange Trechiama-like trechine beetle, Accoella akirai S. UENO (1990, p. 170, fig.
1), was discovered at the southern tip of southwestern Hokkaido, but it has no direct
relationship with the group of Trechiama borealis, to which all the five, previously known
species belong. This species-group is considered to have been derived from an ancestral
species of the group of T. oreas, which somehow reached southern central Hokkaido across
the sea by sweepstakes dispersal (cf. UENO, 1971, pp. 7, 26).
Recently, through the Russo-Japanese cooperative investigations of the East Asian
insect fauna, a new species of anophthalmic Trechiama of the group of T. borealis was
unexpectedly discovered at the southern part of the Sorachi Hills, which run at the western
side of the Yubari Range parallel to it and can be regarded as a branch ridge of the latter.
Most striking is that this new trechine occurs at the foot of a hill only 519 m in height,
whereas all the other members of the same species-group inhabit the alpine or the subalpine
zone above 1,000 m in altitude. It will be described in the present paper under the name of
Trechiama kuznetsovi.