Chrysoesthia sexguttella (Thunberg, 1794), a new species for Bulgaria (Insecta: Lepidoptera: Gelechiidae)

: Chrysoesthia sexguttella (Thunberg, 1794) is reported for the first time from Bulgaria. The species was found on Spinacia oleracea in Vinarovo Village, Vidin Province, Northwestern Bulgaria. Set moth and female genitalia are illustrated.

A single gelechiid moth was observed and collected by the first author on 07.05.2023 in a private yard in Vinarovo Village, Vidin Province.The specimen was found on Spinacia oleracea.
This paper presents the first record of Chrysoesthia sexguttella (Thunberg, 1794) in Bulgaria.

Methods
The moth was set and photographed under a stereomicroscope Stemi 2000-c (Zeiss) equipped with an EOS 1300D (Canon) camera and diffuse light source.The genitalia were prepared according to Robinson (1976) and photographed through an Amplival (Carl Zeiss Jena) compound microscope with an EOS 2000D (Canon) camera attached.The morphological description follows Gregersen & Karsholt (2022).
Notes on biology: The host plants of the larvae are Amaranthus, Atriplex, Bassia scoparia, Chenopodium and Spinacia (Elsner et al., 1999).The larvae feed in a fully transparent blotch-mine with blackish frass clustered at the base or the middle and hibernate in a cocoon on the ground.The species is bivoltine and the adults fly from May to July and again in August (Gregersen & Karsholt, 2022).The habitat is ruderal vegetation, parks, gardens, roadsides, wastelands and vegetable crops (Elsner et al., 1999).Two species from genus Agathis Latreille, 1804 (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) and five species from genus Pnigalio Schrank, 1802 (Hymenoptera: Eulophidae) have been found as parasitoids of C. sexguttella (Triggiani, 1978;Yegorenkova & Yefremova, 2012).
Notes on distribution: Chrysoesthia sexguttella originally had a Palaearctic distribution from Europe to Japan (Elsner et al., 1999).The species is wide-spread in Europe.According to the Fauna Europaea web site (Karsholt, 2013) it is known from Albania, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine.Recently the species has been reported for the first time from Croatia (Šumpich, 2013).Chrysoesthia sexguttella is listed for the lepidopteran fauna of Turkey (Koçak & Kemal, 2009), reported from Kashmir Himalaya, India (Razak et al., 2011) and introduced to North America (Pohl et al., 2018).Also from Japan a new species C. heringi (Kuroko, 1961) has been described, which is similar to C. sexguttella (Kuroko, 1961).