New localities of Charinus ioanniticus

During a biospeleological study in Israel, several specimens of C. ioanniticus were collected from manmade caves around the country, all of them new records for the species. The localities are: 1) Haruba cave, central Israel; 2) several caves in Haifa city (along Carmel Mountain Ridge and along the Northern Coastal Plain), northwestern Israel; 3) Khirbet Roma, Beit Netofa, north Israel (Fig. 6B). One of the caves in Haifa (Al-’Atiqa cave) is particularly interesting as it is a man-made burial cave excavated in kurkar sandstone, less than 200 m from the coastline. The cave is slightly below sea level (one of the chambers is flooded with brackish water). This is, to our knowledge, the first record of a C. ioanniticus populations living below sea level. Additionally, new findings were made in the city of Jerusalem, such as in the entrance of the city (Lifta Tunnel) and in Rehavia (Metudela).

One additional new record is from the Yalan Dünya Cave (Beyrebucak Village, Gazipaşa District, Antalya Province) in Turkey (Fig. 6A), a private, touristic cave which is being gradually destroyed by human activities (Aşan Baydemir et al. 2015). This record extends the known distribution of C. ioanniticus in Turkey, despite being restricted to the southern region, close to the Mediterranean Sea.