Rhagovelia priori subgroup The R. priori subgroup contains a set of three relatively small species, with body lengths of 3.35 mm or less, and a ratio of body length to maximum width of less than 3.0. Females of this subgroup lack concavities or thinned sections on central portion of the connexival margins, and the female ventral abdomen has ventrites I–III flat, not tumescent, and lacking central depressions or transverse sulci on ventrites III or IV (Figs. 208–211). As is typical of the R. papuensis group, the female abdominal morphology and setiferation is modified to varying degrees (Figs. 242, 248, 254), and often useful for discrimination of individual species, whereas the morphology of the males, including the genitalia, is far more interspecifically similar (Figs. 241, 247, 253). Therefore, it is often necessary to obtain a female specimen in order to make a confident species determination. Overall, the members of this subgroup appear to be a more basal and less differentiated stock from which the more distinctively modified species in the R. yela and R. loriae subgroups may have been derived. The three included species, R. priori, R. dinga and R. suloga all occur on small, rocky upland streams (Figs. 40, 47, 187, 259), where they skate on flowing pools. The members of this subgroup in the EPCT occur on isolated Woodlark Island, and widely at middle and lower elevations in the Papuan Peninsula (Figs. 240, 266), although they are lacking in the southward flowing drainages of this peninsula from Port Moresby eastward, where members of the R. loriae subgroup occur instead. They are also absent from the D’Entecasteaux and Louisiade island groups.

Published as part of Polhemus, Dan A., 2024, Thirty-four new species of Rhagovelia (Heteroptera: Veliidae) from the East Papua Composite Terrane, far eastern New Guinea, pp. 1-214 in Zootaxa 5400 (1) on page 144, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5400.1.1, http://zenodo.org/record/10659703