---

Hi,
A reply to all the points of your posting would grow rather long. I agree that part of the inflation in species level taxa is nonsense. Many people don't have a well founded species concept and take morphological differences (that are often an artefact from too small samples) as evidence that distinct species are involved. But the fact that some taxonomists do bad work should not result in a condemnation of all "splitters".
Of course I don't want to give here the information that will be used in my forthcoming paper on the citrofasciatum complex. However, the critics mentioned above do not apply. This split is not based on differences in genitalia nor in a difference in a single character or something like that. There is a whole set of differences, though all of them are not very striking, and - at least in SW Germany - there is a clear difference in the flight period and the sites where they occur. So, again, in my opinion the taxonomic split makes sense ecologically.

Regards,
Dieter