Stabilisation of some names of European butterflies (Lepidoptera: Pieridae) in their prevailing usage Author Balletto, Emilio Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Italy. & emilio. balletto @ unito. it; https: // orcid. org / 0000 - 0003 - 1168 - 2791 Author Barbero, Francesca Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Italy. & francesca. barbero @ unito. it; http: // orcid. org / 0000 - 0003 - 2667 - 0435 Author Bonelli, Simona Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Italy. & simona. bonelli @ unito. it; http: // orcid. org / 0000 - 0001 - 5185 - 8136 Author Casacci, Luca P. Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology, University of Turin, Italy. & Museum and Institute of Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland. Author Dapporto, Leonardo ZEN lab, Department of Biology, University of Florence, Italy. text Zootaxa 2020 2020-05-25 4780 2 387 395 journal article 21881 10.11646/zootaxa.4780.2.11 15a17e6a-ec5e-48d6-8fe1-7e1d19d07f94 1175-5326 3842456 9FCA4ABE-0840-424D-A25A-01DAE715137C Genus Pontia [Fabricius], 1807 The genus Pontia (s.str.) was considered for a long time to include only two Palaearctic species, i.e. P. daplidice (Linnaeus, 1758) and P. glauconome Klug, 1829 , which are more or less broadly distributed also in parts of the African continent. In the early 1980s, however, electrophoretic studies by Geiger & Scholl (1982a , b) and by Geiger et al. (1988) suggested that under the first of these names were included two separate species i.e. P. daplidice and P. edusa (Fabricius, [1777]) (see Wagener 1988 for a discussion of nomenclatural aspects). The sequence analysis of the ‘barcoding fragment’ of the COI mitochondrial gene conducted by John et al. (2013) concurred with the results from electrophoretic studies and showed that the distribution of P. daplidice is principally S.W. European, while P. edusa flies from C.E. Europe to Japan (see also Dapporto et al. 2019 for a large COI dataset). At least in one case, the two species stably occur together in a restricted area in N.W. Italy , where they form a narrow hybridization belt ( Porter et al. 1997 ), while some other cases of spatial overlap (e.g. in Sicily , S.E. Turkey and Israel ) may perhaps be caused by migrant individuals. Since the two species are morphologically indistinguishable (characters listed in Wagener 1988 and by Hesselbarth et al. 1995 are not fully reliable), the usage of at least one species-group name needs to be fixed.