First Description of the Male Ageniella evansi

Abstract

The Pompilidae is a large family of aculeate wasps with a global distribution and over 5,000 valid taxa. Pompilid wasps are ectoparasitoids of spiders, and a wide variety of spider families are used as food for the larvae of this family. The genus Ageniella Banks 1912 is strictly a New World group that currently consists of 112 recognized species, and 36 of them occur in the United States. Ageniella evansi Townes, 1957 (Hymenoptera: Pompilidae) was originally described by Townes in his monograph of the Nearctic wasps of the pompilid subfamilies Pepsinae and Ceropalinae (Townes 1957). The original description was based only on female specimens. The male A. evansi is described here for the first time. This description is an adjunct to an ongoing, long-term study of the populations of the species that nest deep within the caves at Colossal Cave Mountain Park at Vail, Arizona, USA.