CYDNIDAE OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE — FROESCHNER 345 



"Synopsis of the Hemiptera-Heteroptera of America North of Mex- 

 ico." The first two of these appear to be too fragmentary to be of 

 much use, even in the territory for which they were designed; and the 

 hitter obviously was taken du-ectly from the hterature, thus offering no 

 real innovations except to introduce a new error. The first checklist of 

 North American Cydnidae was contributed by Uhler (1886). Van 

 Duzee (1904), Banks (1910), and Van Duzee (1916, 1917) followed 

 with then- catalogs for the same general territory. For the tropical 

 part of the hemisphere there have appeared only two checklists that 

 have attempted to review much material in this group and, conse- 

 quently, were able to list more than a few species. One of these lists 

 was by Pennington (1920) for Argentina and the other by Wolcott 

 (1948) for Puerto Rico. 



In the above-mentioned studies and in certain other less extensive 

 but surely no less important papers, there have been proposed 164 

 species of the Western Hemisphere; these have involved 36 generic 

 names in the systematics of the Cydnidae of the New World. As 

 might be expected, many of the specific names are just synonyms 

 of the commoner species of the area. This compares with the present 

 study in which 141 species are treated in 15 genera. 



Taxonomic Morphology 



The family Cydnidae comprises a superficially monotonous group 

 of spinose, usually unicolorous, similar forms. This is even more 

 descriptive of the species of the Western Hemisphere than of those 

 of the Eastern Hemisphere where several show interesting color 

 patterns. But this similarity is more apparent than real. There are 

 numerous, easily used characters that permit the arrangement of 

 most of the species into clear-cut, often readily recognized groups. 



A brief summary of tlie morphology of the Cydnidae with emphasis 

 on those features used more commonly in this study will aid in inter- 

 preting the following classification and descriptions (see figs. 17, 18 

 for general illustrations of the gross anatomy). The characters most 

 employed in the taxonomy of the Cydnidae are derived from the vesti- 

 ture (including the punctures from which the hau-s arise) , the osteolar 

 structures, the venation of the posterior wings, the modifications of 

 structural shapes and relative lengths of body parts, the surface 

 sculptm*e, and the genitalia. 



The head presents several features for use in generic definition. 

 The number of antenna! segments may be four or five, with the second 

 sometimes very short (fig. 65) and usually with small, very narrow, 

 wealdy sclerotized "ring segments" (not to be counted) between seg- 

 ments in and IV and between IV and V. The labium is always of 

 four segments, of variable length, simple or with a semicircular 



