First record of Aedophron eos Varga & L . Ronkay , 1991 ( Insecta : Lepidoptera , Noctuidae ) from China

A little-known lepidopteran, Aedophron eos Varga & L. Ronkay, 1991, is recorded in China for the first time. Adults and male genitalia of the species are illustrated.

The genus Aedophron Lederer, 1857 (Noctuidae: Heliothinae) comprises five xerophilous species that are distributed in southeast Europe, as well as Western and Central Asia.The systematics of the genus was revised by Fibiger et al. (2009).
Aedophron eos Varga & L. Ronkay, 1991 was described based on a single female from Dzungar Gobi desert in southwestern Mongolia (Varga and Ronkay 1991).Later, the species was reported from western and southeastern Kazakhstan but without exact locations (Ronkay 2002;Fibiger et al. 2009;Gorbunov 2011).The bionomics of the species were not studied, and the early stages and host plants are unknown.According to Gorbunov (2011), the species rarely occurs in deserts, imagines fly from late May to early June.
In the present paper, A. eos is reported from China for the first time.
Since 2003, the author has conducted an intensive faunistic study of the Noctuoidea fauna of the Altai Mountains.In the course of studies on noctuids from Mongol part of the Altai collected by G. E. Grum-Grzhimailo in 1903, a couple of A. eos (Figures 1 and  2) from Koksun Mountains in "West Mongolia" were found.However, the Koksuntau Mountains (also known as the Koksen Tau or Koksun Mountians) are located in the northern part of Xinjiang province, China, and not in Mongolia.Based on these data, A. eos is reported here for the fauna of China for the first time (Figure 3).
The specimens examined are deposited in the collection of Zoological institute of Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia (catalogue numbers ZISP-Aedophron-001 and ZISP-Aedophron-002).The material was examined using modern dissection standards for preparation of genitalia of Lepidoptera.Varga & L. Ronkay, 1991 Aedophron eos Varga and L. Ronkay (1991)

Notes oN GeoGraphic DistributioN
Volynkin | First record of Aedophron eos from China The identification of these specimens was confirmed using the original description of the species (Varga and Ronkay 1991) and the later paper by Ronkay (2002) which published a description of the male genitalia of the species.
Aedophron eos is an unmistakable species and stands out among its congeners by the body structure, presence of conspicuous corona in male genitalia, and small papillae anales with blunt apex in female genitalia.For these reasons it placed in a separate subgenus, Askemosynephron Zilli & L. Ronkay, 2009(Fibiger et al. 2009).
In the wing pattern and coloration, the Chinese specimens of A. eos (Figures 1 and 2) have no differences from the holotype and specimens collected in Kazakhstan (see Ronkay 2002).In the male genitalia (Figure 3), the structure of the vesica is very similar to that of Kazakhstan specimen (see Ronkay 2002), and valvae are somewhat narrower distally, but this difference is not significant because of the high interspecific variability of male genitalia in Aedophron (Fibiger et al. 2009).
"Kazakhstan" Ronkay (2002) The first record for Kazakhstan, but no exact locality given.
Kazakhstan: "the Mangyshlak plateau, the Aral Sea region, the Balkhash Lake region" Gorbunov (2011) The first more detailed data on the species distribution in Kazakhstan, but no exact locality given.Volynkin | First record of Aedophron eos from China southeastern Kazakhstan (Table 1; Varga and Ronkay 1991;Ronkay 2002;Fibiger et al. 2009;Gorbunov 2011).
The new locality of this species in Xinjiang is a first record for the Chinese fauna.It also fills a distributional gap of about 1,000 km between southwestern Mongolia and the Balkhash Lake region).

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Map of the new and the type localities of Aedophron eos in Palearctic region.Note: The type locality cited(Varga and Ronkay 1991) as well as the old labels of specimens cited have no geographical coordinates, so both localities on the map are present as relatively big dots to guarantee the geographic compliance.The records for Kazakhstan do not contain of concrete localities so it is impossible to mark on the map the distribution within Kazakhstan.

Table 1 .
Data on the distribution of Aedophron eos.