New species and records of Anacroneuria (Plecoptera: Perlidae) from the northeastern semi-arid region of Brazil

Abstract

The genus Anacroneuria is widely distributed in the Neotropical Region. There are about 80 species listed from Brazil, five of which are recorded from the northeastern semi-arid region of Brazil, an area characterized by irregular and low precipitation. Examination of adult Anacroneuria material from this including areas of Caatinga desert vegetation and Atlantic forest revealed two new species records, A. debilis (Pictet) and A. terere Righi-Cavallaro & Lecci. Additionally, two new species, A. calori n. sp. and A. singela n. sp., are described from this material. These new records and new species reflect a major effort to document the biodiversity of the aquatic insects of the northeastern semi-arid region of Brazil by the Research Program in Semi-arid Biodiversity. Keywords: Neotropical Region, Brazil, aquatic insects, Caatinga, Atlantic forest, stoneflies, streams Introduction The Plecoptera family Perlidae includes ten genera and about 390 species recorded from the Neotropical Region (Stark et al., 2009; Froehlich, 2010a), comprising 37% of the known species of the family. Anacroneuria Klapálek, 1909 is the most diverse genus among the Anacroneuriini (Stark et al., 2009; Froehlich, 2012). This genus occurs from southern United States to northern Argentina (Stark, 2001; Stark et al., 2009). Froehlich (2010a) listed 330 species of Anacroneuria, of which 69 species are known from Brazil. Currently, there are approximately 80 species recorded in Brazil, comprising approximately 30% of the known species of this genus (Froehlich, 2010a, 2010b; Righi-Cavallaro & Lecci, 2010; Baldin et al., 2013; Righi-Cavallaro et al., 2013; Novaes & Bispo, 2014a, 2014b; Novaes et al., 2014). Five species of Anacroneuria were originally described from the northeastern semi-arid region of Brazil, A. amargosa Righi-Cavallaro & Froehlich, 2013, A. bahiensis Righi-Cavallaro & Lecci, 2013, A. kariri RighiCavallaro & Lecci, 2013, A. lencoensis Righi-Cavallaro & Lecci, 2013, and A. quilombola Righi-Cavallaro & Froehlich, 2013. The sampling efforts of the Research Program in Semiarid Biodiversity (PPBio Semiarid) which included aquatic insects, has provided new records of Anacroneuria from the northeastern semi-arid region of Brazil, an area of irregular and low precipitation. In this paper, we report two new species records and describe two new species of Anacroneuria collected by this program.