Laothoe witti Eitschberger, Danner & Surholt, 1998

Proposed as a subspecies of Laothoe philerema. Implicitly raised to species status by Zolotuhin, 2018, Eversmannia 54: 4. Zolotuhin (2018: 3) (STI 21919) only gave an explicit statement raising Laothoe witti to species status in the Abstract: “The following taxa are raised here to full specific status based on morphological characters and molecular investigation: L. iberica Eitschberger, Danner & Surholt, 1989, L. populetorum (Staudinger, 1887), L. populeti (Bienert, 1870), L. sinica (Rothschild & Jordan, 1903) and L. witti Eitschberger, Danner & Surholt, 1998”. However, abstracts are not generally considered to be citable sources of taxonomic and nomenclatural acts. In the main text, Zolotuhin (2018: 4) (STI 21919) treated Laothoe witti as a species but did not explicitly raise it to that status. He did, however, give a (single) reason for doing so, namely that the DNA barcode divergence from Laothoe philerema was 7.2% (a reasonable value between species of non-feeding Smerinthini, see Řezáč, 2018; STI 21910).