Zootaxa 4915 (1): 148–150 ISSN 1175-5326 (print edition) https://www.mapress.com/j/zt/ Correspondence ZOOTAXA Copyright © 2021 Magnolia Press ISSN 1175-5334 (online edition) https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4915.1.11 http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:B6E4B8EC-AB85-4A15-A2B9-1DDB8275799A Menopon picicola: a new junior synonym of Menacanthus pici (Insecta: Phthiraptera: Menoponidae) RICARDO L. PALMA1 & TERRY D. GALLOWAY2 1Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, P.O. Box 467, Wellington, New Zealand. 2Department of Entomology, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2, Canada. �
[email protected]; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0124-8601 1Corresponding author. �
[email protected]; https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2216-384X Packard (1873) described Menopon picicola as a new species, based on ten lice taken from two species of woodpeckers of the genus Picoides—P. arcticus (Swainson, 1832) and P. dorsalis Baird, 1858—collected in Wyoming, U.S.A. in August 1872. Considering that (1) Packard (1873) neither designated a holotype nor a single type host, (2) his type material is most likely lost, and (3) no additional lice from either of those two species of Picoides have been reported in the literature, the taxonomic status of Menopon picicola has not been confirmed. Based on the albeit brief original description of Menopon picicola, most subsequent authors from the mid-20th cen- tury agreed that this louse species should be placed in the genus Menacanthus Neumann, 1912, because there were no re- cords of Menopon from Piciformes, and considered it as a valid taxon. However, Złotorzycka (1965) placed M.