Additional records of lycaenid butterflies (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) to the butterfly fauna of Iraq

Abstract

The Iraqi butterfly fauna includes more than 50 species of Lycaenidae, however, it is still largely undersampled and the country deserves wide-ranging surveys. Especially the family Lycaenidae is the most likely candidate group for new discoveries. This article adds two species of Lycaenidae to the Iraqi butterfly fauna. The first species is a native Western Palearctic, Tomares romanovi (Christoph, 1882) from mountains of the Kurdistan region, and the second species is an exotic invasive species with Nearctic origin, Brephidium exilis (Boisduval, 1852) from deserts of the south of Iraq.Globally, Lycaenidae is the second most diverse butterfly family, after Nymphalidae. It contains about 6,000 species, which forms about one third of all Papilionoidea (Pierce et al., 2002;van Nieukerken et al., 2011). In Iraq, Lycaenidae is represented by 51 species, 38 species were listed by Wiltshire (1957), later Higgins (1958 adding eight species, and Othman et al. (2018) and Said et al. (2018) recording two species decades later. Khudhur recently reported three new species (2021 and 2022). The vast majority of species in Iraq are distributed in the Kurdistan Region in the North and North East of the country (Othman et al. 2018; Said et al. 2018; Khudhur 2022).The genus Tomares Rambur 1840 is a Palearctic member of a subfamily Theclinae, with about ten species (Nazari and ten Hagen, 2020). The genus in Iraq was so far only known by one species, T. callimachus (Eversmann, 1848), which occurs on the dry slopes of middle-altitude mountains (Wiltshire, 1957;Othman et al. 2018). The butterfly fauna of the neighboring countries confirms the occurrence of 6 additional species of Tomares in Turkey (Çalirkan and Yildiz, 2023) and 4 species in Iran (Rajaei et.al. 2023). Tomares romanovi (Christoph, 1882) is among those Tomares species found in Iran and Turkey. Furthermore, T. romanovi is distributed in the highlands of Transcaucasia, Kopet-Dagh and Armenia (Korb and Bolshakov, 2011).The genus Brephidium Scudder, 1876 contains few species in subfamily Polyommatinae with a disjunct distribution in the Nearctic region and Africa. The genus has three species, two of which are distributed in the southern parts of the United States and Mexico, and one in South and South Eastern Africa (Pohl and Nanz, 2023). Brephidium exilis (Boisduval, 1852) (Western Pygmy Blue) is a species of Nearctic origin, first described in the United States. The species was found during the mid-nineties on the Arabian Peninsula as an exotic invasive species, probably imported as immature stages by plant cultivars from the United States. First record of its existence on the Eastern Arabian Peninsula dates back to 1995 from Sharjah in UAE. Later it was recorded also in