In a revision of four Eurydema speices recorded in Far East Asia, we confirm only two species, one of which consists of two subspecies: E. dominulus (Scopoli 1763) [=E. pulchra (Westwood 1837), syn. nov.], E. gebleri gebleri Kolenati 1846, and E. gebleri rugosa Motschulsky 1861 [stat. nov.]. In order to prove the above taxonomic changes, we compared three major characters; (1) the color patterns, (2) the mitochondrial COI (DNA barcoding) and (3) cross– breeding fertility (inter–specific copulation). Two subspecies, E. g. rugosa and E. g. gebleri, preserve their own unique coloration patterns, confirmed by the intra–subspecific copulation and breeding. Interestingly, the 1st progeny from the inter–subspecific copulation of E. g. rugosa♂ X E. g. gebleri♀ (or E. g. gebleri♂ X E. g. rugosa♀) take the coloration patterns inherited from E. g. gebleri.
In traditional taxonomy on the family Cantharidae, color pattern of the body and the structure of the male genitalia have been often used as diagnostic characters in identification of the specific level. However, these characters caused the difficulty in identifying the female in case a species was described only by male specimens or has the several color types among individuals. In this study, we attempted to evaluate the species reality of Asiopodabrus fragiliformis which was often difficult to be identified due to individual variation in color pattern and lack of information of female, through searching for new morphological diagnostic characters as well as DNA barcoding analysis, including their closely relative species from Russia and Japan. The results showed that A. fragiliformis was represented as three clusters strongly supported by high value of boots trap (>99%) and over 3% branch length. The pairwise distances between species of Asiopodabrus were detected larger, ranged from 3.4–9.5%, than the intragroup distance ranged from 0–2.9% indicating presence of a barcoding gap. And then, the three clusters were respectively determined as A. fragiliformis, A. kurvatovi and a new species through the analysis of morphology and COI gene. Therefore, we suggest that the species delineation on polymorphic species and the female specimens of closely resembling species would be more exactly and effectively determined if DNA barcoding and the traditional taxonomy are used as complementary methods for identification.