A description of the new Egira species from the Russian Far East (Lepidoptera, Noctuidae: Orthosiini)

The Holarctic Noctudae genus Egira Duponchel, 1845 (type-species Phalaena conspicillaris Linnaeus, 1758) enumerates 32 species in the Old and New World. According to the modern classification it belongs to the tribe Orthosiini of the subfamily Noctuinae. The genus is represented in the Old World by fifteen species, distributed from the West Palaearctic to Sino-Himalayan region, where some species have recently been described from Nepal and Thailand (Hreblay 1994; Hreblay & Ronkay 1999). One species, E. saxea (Leech, 1889) is known from Japan. The European species of Egira were revised by Ronkay et al. (2001). The authors detailed discussed the morphological features of the genus and presented the checklist of the Palaearctic species. According to Ronkay et al. (2001) the genus is separated into four species-groups, one of them is the conspicillaris-group, including five species, which can be regarded as Egira sensu stricto. The group includes E. conspicillaris (Linnaeus, 1758), E. tibori Hreblay, 1994, E. fatima Hreblay, 1994, E. anatolica (Hering, 1933) and E. servadei Berio, 1982. This lineage has been considered as being exclusively Western-Palearctic, the distribution area of the species extending from Morocco to the southern Urals on the North and across Turkey and Iran to the Tien-Shan and Pamir mountains in the South. No one species of Egira was known previously from the Russian Far East neither from the South Siberia (Kononenko 1990; 2005). In the spring of 2013, a single male of an unknown Egira species, similar to E. conspicillaris, was collected in the south of Primorye territory of the Russian Far East in a well-studied and classical collecting place for many entomologists since decades. The examination of the species doubtlessly confirmed that it is new to science. Present article contains the description and the proper taxonomic placement of the new species comparing to its closest relative. We express our thanks to Vadim Golovizin (Russia, Krasnoyarsk) for presenting of the material for description. The holotype of the new species deposited in the collection of Balazs Benedek, Torokbalint, Hungary, later will be deposited to the Hungarian Nature History Museum.