Cynips (arida) conspecta, new species
Agamic form

GALL.—Similar to but readily distinguished from other galls of the complex. Mature gall almost strictly spherical, with a flat or slightly concave base; perfectly smooth, light led brown in color, with a white scurf which persists on at least part of the gall; up to 6.5 mm., averaging near 5.0 mm. in diameter.

HOST. — Quercus Pringlei, one of the several scrub oaks of the region; replaced on other scrub oaks in the same area by C. rubella.

RANGE.—Tamaulipas : Miquihuana, 7 SE, 6000' (types). Known only from this one locality in the southwestern corner of Tamaulipas.

In our previous revision of the Cynips arida complex (Kinsey 1936, Ind. Univ. Sci. Ser. 4:217-237), the only species reported from the Eastern Mexican Sierra was Cynips saxifera, from a locality west of Ciudad Victoria, in the southwestern corner of Tamaulipas. From a few miles west of that same locality, from Miquihuana, which is still in Tamaulipas but immediately east of the main divides of the Sierra, we now have two more species to describe.

In this locality southeast of Miquihuana, there are several species of scrub or dwarf oaks, from three of which we have now bred insects of the present complex. Although these dwarf oaks are so closely related that it is often difficult to distinguish them in the field, we find that two perfectly distinct and not closely related insects are isolated on different oaks. The present species, C. conspecta, occurs on Q. Pringlei. As yet we do not have it from any other oak. It is C. rubella (described in the present paper) which occurs on the scrub oak, Q. intricata, and on the low dwarf, Q. cordifolia. The two cynipids are as different as the two most extreme forms in the arida complex. To note only a few of the differences: The galls of conspecta are nearly spherical, almost entirely smooth, and a bit smaller in average diameter; those of rubella are more hemispherical, distinctly shrivelled, and slightly larger in diameter. The insects of conspecta are almost uniformly brownish rufous, without any marks or blotches in the cubital cell, and with almost no infuscations at the base of the radial cell; the insects of rubella are red rufous with the lateral lines (and sometimes the anterior parallel lines) distinctly brown, and the splotches in the cubital cell and the infuscation at the base of the radial cell are distinct and of some size. Conspecta is most closely related to the contacta-eluta-eminida group of species from more southern Mexico; 266 Proceedings of Indiana Academy of Science rubella has its closest relatives in saxifera, from a more eastern part of the same Eastern Sierra, and in saxulum, from the Western Mexican Sierra. It is an interesting case of two branches of the one complex invading the one locality where they are, however, still separated by their restriction to different oak hosts.

From contacta, its geographically and evolutionary nearest relative, conspecta is to be distinguished by . . . its larger and more spherical gall. In contacta the gall is distinctly dome-shaped.

- Alfred Kinsey: (1938) New Mexican gall wasps (Hymenoptera, Cynipidae) IV^©