Helcita is a small genus of planthoppers from the family Derbidae, tribe Zoraidini, currently (2024) with only 4 species. All of the species are uncommon. They have rather restricted and widely separated distribution ranges. Two species are found in tropical parts of Africa, one in Sri Lanka and southern India, and one in Taiwan and some neighbouring islands of Japan. The species of Helcita can be distinguished from other similar genera by a combination of features related to the venation of the forewings and the shape of the head. On the forewing, the media vein has 6 branches with the 3rd br
Helcita is a small genus of planthoppers from the family Derbidae, tribe Zoraidini, currently (2024) with only 4 species. All of the species are uncommon. They have rather restricted and widely separated distribution ranges. Two species are found in tropical parts of Africa, one in Sri Lanka and southern India, and one in Taiwan and some neighbouring islands of Japan. The species of Helcita can be distinguished from other similar genera by a combination of features related to the venation of the forewings and the shape of the head. On the forewing, the media vein has 6 branches with the 3rd branch forking further into 2 sub branches. This venation is similar to that of the genus Pamendanga from which Helcita species can be distinguished by the profile of the head. In Helcita species, the head extends conically in front of the eyes, whereas Pamendanga species have a flat profile.
Type species: Derbe wahlbergi Stål, 1855, a synonym of Helcita wahlbergi
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).