Pterolonchidae is a small family of very small moths in the superfamilyGelechioidea. There are species native to every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
Taxonomy and systematics
As of 2014 the family may be considered to consist of the following seven genera:
The family Pterolonchidae was first named by Edward Meyrick in 1918. Meyrick omitted a description, thus the family was a nomen nudum, until Thomas Bainbrigge Fletcher provided the first description of the family in 1929. In 1987 published a revision of the family. Vives included seven species in two genera in the family, describing two new species and synonymising one species within the genus Pterolonche. He also published a new subgeneric classification for Pterolonche: the subgeneraAgenjius and Gomezbustillus to classify respectively two species native to southern Andalucia and the northwestern Maghreb, and one species native to Sicily. In 1999Ron Hodges classified the group as the subfamily Pterolonchinae of the family Coleophoridae, including eight species in two genera. His classification was based on morphology. In WikiSpecies in 2008, the Pterolonchidae mysteriously included:
Phthinostoma Meyrick, 1914Pterolonche Zeller, 1847In 's 2011 attempt to number all the known animal species of earth, van Nieukerken et al., the authors of the section on Lepidoptera, followed the works of Vives in 1987 and Hodgesin 1999 regarding the Pterolonchidae. They recognised the Coelopoetidae and Syringopaidae as distinct families. In their taxonomic interpretation, the family Pterolonchidae was circumscribed by Edward Meyrick in 1918, and comprised eight species in two genera. Plexippica had originally been described as an independent monotypic genus by Edward Meyrick in 1912, but the single species was moved to the genus Pterolonche by him in 1924. Nonetheless the lone taxon found itself classified as a member of the Yponomeutinae subfamily of the Yponomeutidae family in the Yponomeutoidea superfamily under its old name. The species was then rediscovered in South Africa and described as the new genus Kruegerius by Vives in 1999, and was placed in the Pterolonchidae by him, but in 2011 re-recognised Plexippica, synonymised Kruegerius with Plexippica, moved the genus to the Pterolonchidae yet again, and described a new second species in the genus. Three years later, in 2014, a cladistic analysis by Heikkilä et al. added the genera Homaledra and Houdinia to the Pterolonchidae from the family Batrachedridae, moved the two enigmatic genera Coelopoeta and Syringopais from respectively the Elachistidae and the Deoclonidae as monotypic subfamilies within the Pterolonchidae, and two genera were included besides the type genus within a new subfamily Pterolonchinae:
Both genera Anathyrsa and Pterolonche are nocturnal. In Pterolonche both sexes are attracted to lamps at night and are easy to collect. Syringopais temperatella imagoes are active both day and night in May in Turkey, and lay their eggs in the summer, with the caterpillars emerging in the winter and early spring. Homaledra builds elaborate feeding chambers of silk under which the caterpillars hide. larvae infesting the roots of a Centaurea species. Coelopoeta caterpillars mine in the leaves of Boraginaceae, which in one species creates a gall-like deformation. Homaledra feeds on the undersides of the leaves of palms. Houdinia mines in Restionaceae and Syringopais'' in grasses.