| Alucita | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Twenty-plume moth (A. hexadactyla) imago | |
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Lepidoptera |
| Family: | Alucitidae |
| Genus: | Alucita Linnaeus, 1758 |
| Type species | |
| Alucita hexadactyla Linnaeus, 1758 | |
| Synonyms [1] | |
Alucita is the largest genus of many-plumed moths (family Alucitidae); it is also the type genus of its family and the disputed superfamily Alucitoidea. This genus occurs almost worldwide and contains about 180 species as of 2011 [update] ; new species are still being described and discovered regularly.[ citation needed ] Formerly, many similar moths of superfamilies Alucitoidea, Copromorphoidea and Pterophoroidea were also placed in Alucita.[ citation needed ]
Contents
The genus Alucita was established by Carl Linnaeus in the 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae as a subgenus of Phalaena , Linné's "wastebin genus" for moths[ citation needed ]. Johan Christian Fabricius in 1775 seems to have been the first author to consider Alucita a genus in its own right, and it remains so until today.[ citation needed ] However, some subsequent authors[ who? ] believed Linnaeus' name to be invalid, and established alternative names for this genus, but, while the oldest of these, Pierre André Latreille's Orneodes, was used instead of Alucita for a long time, all these subsequent names are today recognized as junior synonyms. [1]