Nemaspela Šilhavý, 1966

Martens, Jochen, Maghradze, Eter & Barjadze, Shalva, 2021, Two new species of the genus Nemaspela Šilhavý from caves in Georgia (Opiliones Nemastomatidae), Zootaxa 4951 (3), pp. 541-558 : 543

The genus Nemaspela Šilhavý, 1966

Nemaspela Šilhavý, 1966 , Senckenbergia biologica 47: 72.

Type species: Buresiolla sokolovi Ljovuschkin & Starobogatov, 1963 (by original designation).

— Martens 2006: 169; Chemeris 2009: 287; Tchemeris 2013: 41; Karaman 2013: 241; Schönhofer 2013: 35; Turbanov et al. 2018: 363; Kozel et al. 2020: 4.

The taxonomic history of Nemaspela is relatively short. The first troglobiont nemastomatid species was placed in Nemastoma by Grese (1911) from caves in the Crimea, Ukraine, then the genus name covering most species of the family. Later Buresiolla Kratochvíl, 1958 was erected for a troglobiotic species from Bulgarian caves, but its type species did not belong to the later Nemaspela and the genus Buresiolla was synonymized with Paranemastoma Redikorzew, 1936 . But Ljovuschkin & Starobogatov (1963) followed the Buresiolla affiliation of troglobiont nemastomatids, when they named the first Caucasian troglobiont nemastomatids ( Buresiolla sokolovi Ljovuschkin & Starobogatov, 1963 and Buresiolla abchasica Ljovuschkin & Starobogatov, 1963 ). Šilhavý (1966) clarified the situation and erected the genus Nemaspela for the Caucasian troglobiont nemastomatid species. After a long hiatus of about 34 years, Martens (2006) described Nemaspela femorecurvata Martens, 2006 from a cave in Racha region, western Georgia, then the easternmost record of the genus. The last novelties in the Caucasian fauna were Nemaspela kovali Chemeris, 2009 and Nemaspela gagrica Tchemeris, 2013 , the latter from Georgia and the former from Kabardino-Balkaria, Russia. This rather strict concentration of Nemaspela species in the Caucasus and the Crimea was greatly enlarged by the discovery of two species in a Dinaric cave in Bosnia-Herzegovina ( Nemaspela ladae Karaman, 2013 ) and in Montenegro in the south-western Balkan Peninsula ( Nemaspela borkoae Kozel, Delić & Novak, 2020 ). These authors called them the western species group, these species lacking cheliceral apophysis in males. The additional discovery of two further Nemaspela species as proposed here expands the Caucasian species set to eight and Nemaspela in general to eleven.