New record of Drasterius confusus Platia & Gudenzi, 1997 (Coleoptera: Elateridae: Agrypninae) for the Pakistani fauna.
The family Elateridae, has a World fauna of approximately 10,000 species, while subfamily Agrypninae represents a cosmopolitan group with approximately 800 species (Laibner, 2000). The last reclassification (Von Hayek, 1973, 1979) listed seven genera from India and two from West Bengal. Many authors (Vats and Chauhan, 1992, 1993; Vats and Kashyap, 1992a,b, 1993, 1996; Chakraborty and Chakraborty, 2000) worked on Agrypninae from India, while Chakraborty and Chakrabarti (2006) studied the elateridae from Bengal. Cate (2007) listed fifteen species of the genus Drasterius Eschscholtz from Palearctic region, while Platia and Gudenzi (1997) recognized twelve species belonging to the same genus from Oriental region. Akhter et al. (2012) studied Agrypninae and listed Drasterius sulcutulus Candeze, D. brahminus Candeze, D. csorbai Platia and Gudenzi and D. collaris Candeze from Pakistan. In September 2012, we discovered Drasterius confusus Platia and Gudenzi, 1997 from Thar Desert, Sindh which represents a new country record. Seven male specimens were collected from Mithi, Thar Desert. According to Platia and Gudenzi (1997) D. confusus was described from Konbir, India. This species is very similar to D. collaris Candeze, but it can be distinguished from this species by average larger size (length 4-5 mm), apex of posterior angles of __________________________________ * Corresponding author: zbrahmed36@gmail.com pronotum not divergent and pronotum just wider than long. We thank Rainer Schimmel, Germany for help in identification of the species, which is deposited in (NHMUK) Natural History Museum, University of Karachi. This study was partially supported by Mini Research Project 2524 from Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan.