A new Syngrapha Hübner, [1821] from the Altai Mountain Country (Lepidoptera Noctuidae)

Abstract

The genus Syngrapha Hübner, [1821] includes about 40 species distributued throughout the Holarctic region, but with only 11 species and 16 subspecies described from Eurasia. Many Syngrapha inhabit the subarctic zone or high elevation mountains. The genus is close to Autographa but differs from it in a variety of male and female genitalic characteristics (see revision of Eurasian fauna by Ronkay & al. 2008). In the course of faunistic studies on Noctuidae of the Altai Mountain Country, an undescribed species of Syngrapha was identified among specimens at the Zoological Museum of the Institute of Systematics & Ecology of Animals Siberian Branch of RAS (SZMN; Novosibirsk, Russia) and at the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ZISP; Saint-Petersburg, Russia). It is described herein as new. We use the term Altai Mountain Country (Fig. 1) in the geo-botanical sense of Kamelin (1998, 2005) to include: the Russian, Kazakhstanian, Chinese and Mongolian Altai; the mountains of Boundary Dzhungaria (Tarbagatai and branches, Manrak, Semistai and Saur); the Zaisan intermountain depression; the mountains of SW Tyva and the main part of the Western Sayan ridges adjacent to the meridional Shapshal Ridge, north to the Abakan Ridge; east to theYenisey river; and south to the Baitak-Bogdo Ridge and nearby highlands together with the mountains enclosing the depression of the “Dzhungarian Gobi” and the Adzh-Bogd-uul Ridge. The Altai Mountain Country does not include the Kuznetzky Alatau, the steppe depressions of Khakassia and Western Tyva, the Mongolian Big Lakes depression and the Khan-Khuhay Ridge, or the Gobian Altai massif (Kamelin 2005).