We describe five new species of Abantiades from Australia, four from Western Australia (WA) and one from south-east Queensland. Of the four WA species, three are from the Geraldton Sandplains biogeographic region (Abantiades profundus sp. nov., A. kolpodes sp. nov., and A. patella sp. nov.), and the fourth (A. lepusaures sp. nov.) was found in the Eastern Goldfields region. The Queensland species (A. incognito sp. nov.) comes from the south-eastern Queensland biogeographic region. Our five new species demonstrated the importance of wing morphology, genitalia and antennal structure in diagnosing Abantiades species. However, antennal structure as a diagnostic character defining these species highlighted historical problems that, in part, were used to erect Trictena and Bordaia, recently synonymised into Abantiades. To explore this further, we used mtDNA COI ‘barcode’ sequences and compared our new species with all currently available species for the genus Abantiades.
Moore et al. (Mon,) studied this question.