ZOOTAXA ISSN 1175-5326 (print edition) ISSN 1175-5334 (online edition) Accepted by A. Cavalleri: 17 Aug. 2020; published: 15 Sept. 2020 239 Zootaxa 4852 (2): 239–245 https://www.mapress.com/j/zt/ Copyright © 2020 Magnolia Press Article https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.4852.2.10 http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:FF7918E8-AD57-4C71-BB5D-4480190AB9E2 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Character state variation among species of Thrips genus (Thysanoptera) in Malaysia, with one new species and two new records Y. F. NG 1 & L. A. MOUND 2 1 Centre for Insect Systematics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia. 2 Australian National Insect Collection, CSIRO, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. 1 ng_yf@ukm.edu.my; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9895-415X 2 laurence.mound@csiro.au; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6019-4762 Abstract Thrips korbuensis sp.n. is described from a high elevated area in Peninsular Malaysia. It shares many character states with Thrips coloratus but has 8-segmented antennae and abdominal segment VIII–X uniformly dark. It also shares some features with Thrips florum, and variation in some character states used to distinguish species in the Thrips hawaiiensis group are discussed. Two species, Thrips brevistylus and Thrips subnudula, are recorded for the first time from Malaysia, and an updated checklist is provided of 27 species of the genus Thrips recorded from Malaysia. Key words: Thripinae, identification, Thrips hawaiiensis group Introduction The genus Thrips Linnaeus is the most species-rich Thysanoptera genus. The large number of included species, cur- rently almost 300 worldwide (ThripsWiki 2020), often leads to confusing results when trying to identify even some of the common pest species of the Asian tropics. For example, Thrips florum, T. hawaiiensis and T. palmi are all con- sidered species of economic importance in Peninsular Malaysia (Ng & Saiful Zaimi 2018), and T. parvispinus is the most abundant species in this area on various ornamental plants (unpublished data in Ng, Y.F. collection). However, collections of each of these four sometimes include samples of individuals that cannot be recognised satisfactorily (Palmer 1992), and each of these species has been collected from a range of different plant species. Thrips hawaiien- sis is presumably native to Asia, but is clearly polyphagous and was the pollinator in Malaysia of the introduced oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis) before the pollinator weevil, Elaeidobius kamerunicus, was introduced in early 1982 (Wahid & Kamarudin 1997). In southeast Asian rainforests the dominant trees are species of the Dipterocarpaceae. Thysanoptera are recorded in the flowers of these trees (Appanah & Chan 1981), and Ng et al. (2019) described Tenothrips keruing from the flowers of Dipterocarpus sublamellatus at Pasoh Forest Reserve, about 70km south of Kuala Lumpur. However, it seems likely that there is a considerable undescribed Thysanoptera fauna in association with these rain forest trees, although this remains largely unexplored, including the host plants on which even the most common species actually breed. The lack of such precise biological data, and hence the absence of reliable data on intra-population structural variation, leads to problems in identifying species of the genus Thrips. The ob- jectives here are to consider variation in some character states among the commonly collected species in the Thrips hawaiiensis group. We record for the first time from Peninsular Malaysia three further species of genus Thrips, one of which is newly described, and present a revised list of Thrips species from Malaysia (Table 1). Several extensive reviews of Thrips genus in Asia have been published. These include: Asia Pacific area – 91 species (Palmer 1992); Philippines – 20 species (Reyes 1994); Peninsular Malaysia – 23 species (Mound & Azidah 2009); China – 33 species (Zhang et al. 2011); Japan – 36 species (Masumoto & Okajima 2013; 2019). However, use of these keys can lead to inconsistent conclusions. Many of the most common species of this genus are members of the “Group V” of Palmer (1992: 20), particularly those referred to in couplets 79 to 93 of the key to females pro- vided in that paper. Two of the most common species, T. hawaiiensis and T. florum, are readily distinguished from