On the Psyllidae of New Zealand (Homoptera)^ 
L. D. Tuthill^ 
INTRODUCTION 
The psyllid fauna of New Zealand has here- 
tofore been only poorly known. It has been, 
therefore, a highly prized opportunity to 
spend a year in New Zealand collecting and 
studying this family of insects. It is obvious 
that one cannot hope to exhaust or even 
cover adequately the insect resources of an 
area of the size and diversity of New Zealand 
in one season, but enough was accomplished 
during that time to indicate the direction for 
further work and to give some idea of the re- 
lationships of the psyllid fauna of New Zea- 
land to that of other areas. 
Only two papers of significance on the 
Psyllidae of New Zealand have been pub- 
lished previously. These are Maskell’s paper 
(1890) and that of Ferris and Klyver (1932). 
Masked brought together his knowledge of 
the group in New Zealand and rectified some 
of the errors made in his earlier brief com- 
munications (Masked, 1879, 1880). Portions 
of Masked’s material, which I have been able 
to study, consist of a few dried nymphs and 
one or two fragmentary adults in the collec- 
tion at Cawthron Institute and three slides 
and a vial of dried nymphs in the Canterbury 
Museum. The paper of Ferris and Klyver was 
based on a collection of 450 specimens ac- 
cumulated by Dr. J. G. Myers. They sum- 
marized ad the earlier work and gave an ade- 
quate treatment of the 25 species which they 
had at hand. I have been able to collect and 
^This work was made possible by a Fulbright Grant 
received under U.S. Public Law 584 and administered 
by the United States Educational Foundation in New 
Zealand, Manuscript received October 15, 1951. 
^Department of Zoology and Entomology, Uni- 
versity of Hawaii. 
identify with reasonable certainty ad but four 
of their species. Of the four, I have some 
question as to the identity of two; a third, 
probably a synonym, was not obtained; and 
the fourth, Gyropsylla zealandica (Ferris and 
Klyver), I was unable to locate. Two unex- 
plained omissions from the paper of Ferris 
and Klyver are the lack of any indication of 
date for any of the material and the absence 
of any statement of size except for one species. 
As many of the New Zealand species appear 
to be very definitely seasonal, the collection 
data are quite important. 
The bulk of the Myers collection, includ- 
ing ad the types, was returned by Ferris and 
Klyver to Dr. Myers, who was killed in an 
accident shortly thereafter. As I have been 
unable to locate his collection, several un- 
certainties must remain until such time as its 
disposition can be ascertained and the speci- 
mens studied further, if they still exist. 
Thanks to the excellence of the illustrations, 
which are of the high standard usually pro- 
duced by Ferris, few ready serious obstacles 
were encountered. 
In addition to the species recognized by 
Ferris and Klyver, I have obtained those of 
Masked which they did not have, and I am 
adding 23 new species and 2 new genera to 
make a total of 5 1 species and 6 genera known 
from New Zealand. In this paper I have not 
repeated the descriptions or figures of those 
species which have been adequately described 
or figured previously. 
Ad of the holotype and allotype specimens 
of the new species are deposited in the Caw- 
thron Institute at Nelson. I feel very strongly 
that type material should be left in the coun- 
try of origin if there is an institution within 
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