Over the course of many years identifying British Coleoptera, I have used various characters to separate closely-similar species, which do not appear to have been published, or are poorly-known to British coleopterists. For example, Booth (2003)showed that differences in the shape of the genital segment (tergites IX and X) could be used to distinguish females of the larger Lathrobium species, where previously only the males could be separated readily. Lott & Anderson (2011) incorporated these findings into their Handbook and provided illustrations for all the British species. In this paper, I present some characters which I have found helpful for separating the females of three pairs of Staphylinidae: Proteinus brachypterus (Fabricius) and P. ovalis Stephens, Leptusa fumida (Erichson) and L. norvegica Strand, and Atheta vaga (Heer) and A. harwoodi Williams.
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