An atypical new species of the genus Macrocentrus Curtis, 1833 (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) from India

Macrocentrus Curtis, 1833 is a large cosmopolitan genus of the subfamily Macrocentrinae (Braconidae) which harbour koinobiont solitary or gregarious endoparasitoids of lepidopteran larvae (Sharanowski et al. 2014). Few species of Macrocentrus are polyembryonic while the majority is non-gregarious (Muesebeck 1932; van Achterberg 1993). Recently, M. equalis Lyle, 1914 was recorded from Jammu & Kashmir region of India (Fiza et al. 2025) adding to a total of seven species namely M. collaris (Spinola, 1808), M. nixoni Kurhade & Nikam, 1998, M. persephone Nixon, 1950, M. turkestanicus (Telenga, 1950), M. delhiensis Akhtar, Singh & Ramamurthy, 2014, and M. hayati Ahmad, Mir & Usmani, 2020. Yu et al. (2016) have provided range of lepidopteran hosts of mainly members of Noctuidae and Tortricidae. In the present study, an atypical species of Macrocentrus is described and illustrated from India. The specimens were collected from Arunachal Pradesh, north-eastern India. Morphological terminology in general follows van Achterberg (1993). The following abbreviations are used in the description: POL—Posterior Ocellar Line, OOL—Ocular Ocel­lar Line and OD—Ocellar Diameter. Photographs were taken with a Leica M 205A stereozoom microscope with Leica DFC 420 inbuilt camera. The specimens of the present study are deposited in the National Insect Museum, ICAR-NBAIR, Bengaluru, India.