Cleaning out the junk drawer: A phylogeny of the Teleonemia Costa generic complex (Hemiptera: Tingidae)

The Teleonemia Costa generic complex is distributed throughout the Western Hemisphere. It is characterized by the presence of the following attributes; general tan to brown or red-brown coloration, apically rounded antenniferous tubercles, setose antennae that end in moderately elongate or obclavate distiflagellomeres, vertically reflexed paranota, three uniseriate pronotal carinae, well developed ostiolar peritremes, coxae with setae on distal margins; subcostal area of each hemelytra with one to four rows of areolae and pygophore with two basal depressions. Separation of the included genera, Alveotingis Osborn & Drake, Eurypharsa Stål, Hesperotingis Parshley, Melanorhopala Stål, and Teleonemia have historically relied on antennal morphology and the width of the costal areas of the hemelytra; however, the generic boundaries of most included genera have been modified through subsequent description of taxa during the past century. A phylogenetic analysis was undertaken to better define the generic boundaries within the complex. A 98-character multistate character matrix with 150 taxa was created in Mesquite 3.7 and analyzed in PAUP* 4.0 using non additive parsimony analysis. Characters were treated unordered and without weights. We performed a heuristic search with 500 random replications, with one starting tree per replication. Our results indicate that several genera of the complex, Teleonemia, Hesperotingis, and Melanorhopala, are not monophyletic and need to be redefined in order to proceed with generic revisions. We also propose several new genera to accommodate phylogenetic incongruence and stabilize the current classification of the Teleonemia generic complex.