Culiseta (Culiseta) alaskaensis

• Main Authors: Harbach, Ralph E., Wilkerson, Richard C.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Taxonomy; Animalia; Arthropoda; Insecta; Diptera; Culicidae; Culiseta; Culiseta alaskaensis; Canada; Egbert; Norway; Newfoundland; Alaska; Siberia
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/8064277; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8064277

Culiseta (Culiseta) alaskaensis (Ludlow) subspecies alaskaensis (Ludlow, 1906) —original combination: Theobaldia alaskaensis. Distribution: Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Canada, Crimean Peninsula, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States (Wilkerson et al. 2021). subspecies indica (Edwards, 1920) —original combination: Theobaldia indica (subspecific status by Maslov 1964). Distribution: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan (Wilkerson et al. 2021). Culiseta alaskaensis was described from five females and one male collected at Fort Egbert, Alaska (Ludlow 1906). According to published works, Cs. alaskaensis sensu stricto is a Holarctic species. In the Nearctic Region, it is found in western North America from Colorado to Alaska and across Canada to Newfoundland. In the Palaearctic Region, it occurs in northern Europe southward to the northern slopes of the Alps and eastward to the far east of Siberia. Subspecies indica was originally described as a species based on specimens collected in the hilly and mountainous areas of Haryana State (Ambala) and Himachal Pradesh State (Bakloh and Dalhousie) in the far north of India (Edwards 1920) and was reclassified as a subspecies of alaskaensis by Maslov (1964). Both subspecies are recorded from localities in Armenia, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine. If the identifications are correct, it would appear that the distributions of the two forms overlap, indicating that they may occur in sympatry. However, those countries lie far north of the type locality of indica, which is located on the south side of the Himalaya Mountains, and they are thus likely to be based on misidentified specimens of the typical form. This agrees with the allopatric distributions of the two forms depicted ...