Rhodacarus roseus Oudemans, 1902

Castilho, Raphael C., De Moraes, Gilberto J. & Halliday, Bruce, 2012, 3471, Zootaxa 3471, pp. 1-69 : 50

145. Rhodacarus roseus Oudemans, 1902

Rhodacarus roseus Oudemans, 1902: 50 . Genus and species unknown, number 81.— Oudemans, 1896: 136. Rhodacarus roseus f. typica Sheals, 1958: 299 . Rhodacarus roseus .— Athias-Henriot, 1961: 498; Hirschmann, 1962: 49; Lee, 1970: 29; Karg, 1971: 322; Lee,

1973a: 2; Lee, 1973b: 141; Bregetova & Shcherbak, 1977b: 267; Evans & Till, 1979: 206; Zaher, 1986:

16; Krantz, 1986: 634; Fouly & Nawar, 1990: 336; Krantz & Ainscough, 1990: 618; Farrier &

Hennessey, 1993: 133; Karg, 1993: 334. Rhodacarus (Rhodacarus) roseus .— Shcherbak, 1980: 43.

TYPE DEPOSITORY: National Museum of Natural History – Naturalis , Leiden, Netherlands .

TYPE LOCALITY AND HABITAT: Netherlands, Haarlem , on decaying leaves .

NOTES: Sheals (1958) recognised two forms of Rhodacarus roseus — R. roseus f. typica , with a V-shaped groove on the podonotal shield, and R. roseus f. simplex , without a groove. Sheals' R. roseus f. typica appears to match R. roseus , but his R. roseus f. simplex remains unidentified. Schweizer (1961) illustrated R. roseus without a podonotal groove, so the identity of those specimens must also be considered as doubtful. The name Rhodacarus roseus has been used in a large number of publications reporting faunistic and ecological studies of soil arthropods (e.g. Block, 1966; Costa, 1966; Lee, 1973b; Sardar & Murphy, 1987). In view of the difficulty of identifying R. roseus and related species, it seems likely that this name has been applied to a number of different species. Bregetova & Shcherbak (1977) suggested that R. roseus sensu Sheals (1958) could be a misidentification of R. laureti . Sheals (1958) also considered Rhodacarus roseus to be a senior synonym of R. mandibularis . However, we follow other recent authors in considering these to be two different species (see under R. mandibularis ).