Cholovocera maderae Wollaston 1854

• Main Authors: Delgado, Juan A., Palma, Ricardo L.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Taxonomy; Animalia; Arthropoda; Insecta; Coleoptera; Endomychidae; Cholovocera; Cholovocera maderae; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10424589; http://treatment.plazi.org/id/6703879E4D31046FF74EB2386453FC17

Cholovocera maderae Wollaston, 1854 This taxon has a convoluted history regarding both its generic placement and its original geographic distribution. It was described from a single specimen, collected in the island of Madeira, in the North Atlantic Ocean. In the original description, Wollaston (1854: 180) wrote that it differed from the other two members of Cholovocera by its larger size (“Long. corp. lin. 7/8”), no punctuation, a more rounded outline, and described the eyes as “prominent”, “being composed of merely few large facets, set widely apart upon a convex surface”. Firstly, the given body length would be equivalent to 1.86 mm, a much longer measurement that the longest species of Cholovocera (see above); secondly, the multifaceted eye is not a generic feature of Cholovocera , which has only one facet, protected by a lateral rim (Fig. 24E). “ Cholovocera ” maderae has been recorded from several localities around the world, always associated with the longhorn crazy ant, Paratrechina longicornis (Latreille, 1802), a pantropical invasive species, which appears to be responsible for the wide distribution of the beetle, but both have an unknown geographic origin. Dajoz (1975: 200) transferred Cholovocera maderae to the genus Displotera Reitter, 1887, erected for the species Displotera simoni Reitter, 1887 from Addah, in the old British Gold Coast (present Ivory Coast) in western Africa. Also, Dajoz (1975) regarded D. simoni as a junior synonym of D. maderae and included two other species in Displotera : D . beloni (Wasmann, 1899) from north-eastern India, and D. grandis Dajoz, 1975 from Sri Lanka, because these three species had six facets on each ocular area. Thus, Dajoz (1975) implied that this genus had an Asiatic origin, but with a cosmopolitan member. Although Reitter (1887) did not mention any association of D. simoni with ants, Paratrechina longicornis does occur in Ivory Coast. According to Wasmann (1905: 385), most of the localities where the species P. longicornis and “ Ch .” maderae had been ...