Sperchon amuzgari Bader & Sepasgosarian, 1979

Pešić, Vladimir, Zawal, Andrzej, Saboori, Alireza & Smit, Harry, 2021, New records of water mites (Acari, Hydrachnidia) from Iran with the description of one new species based on morphology and DNA barcodes, Zootaxa 5082 (5), pp. 425-440 : 431

Sperchon amuzgari Bader & Sepasgosarian, 1979

Material examined — Iran, Mazandaran Province, IR7 small stream along road to Kandelous village , 36.426388 N, 51.470001 E, 28.viii.2017 leg. Pešić, Zawal & Saboori, 3♀ (sequenced [ CCDB38233 F09, -F11, -G01]) .

Remarks — Sperchon amuzgari was described by Bader & Sepasgosarian (1979) from a karstic spring in Lorestan Province, Iran. Later on, Asadi et al. (2010) re-examined the holotype of S. amuzgari and found that in view of the similar shape of the palp and dorsum, III/IV-L-3–5 with numerous pinnate dorsal setae and sclerotized excretory pore the later species matches the morphology of S. hispidus Koenike, 1895 , a species widely distributed in the Western Palaearctic ( Di Sabatino et al. 2010). As a result, Asadi et al. (2010) proposed to place S. amuzgari in synonymy with S. hispidus . During our 2017 survey in Northern Iran we collected and successfully barcoded three specimens of hispidus -like mites that match the original description of S. amuzgari . According to the original description, S. amuzgari can be separate from S. hispidus by having a parallelogram-shaped Cx-IV ( Bader & Sepasgosarian 1979).

The final alignment for species delimitation using COI sequence data comprised sequences of 34 Sperchon specimens listed in Table 4 and one outgroup, Sperchonopsis verrucosa (Protz, 1896) [BOLD 46. M19_16B_1_ G10] from Montenegro to root the tree. The neighbor-joining (NJ) tree is presented in Fig. 4 . The COI tree sequence recovered S. amuzgari as a sister branch to the clade grouping COI sequences found in S. hispidus ( Fig. 4 ). The average genetic distance between the COI sequence of the three specimens of S. amuzgari from Iran and two specimens of S. hispidus from Montenegro was estimated to 16.5% K2P indicating a long independent history of these two species. Therefore, we propose to resurrect Sperchon amuzgari Bader & Sepasgosarian, 1979 as a valid species distinct from S. hispidus .

Distribution— Iran.

Figures

FIGURE 4. Neighbor-joining tree based on studied Sperchon COI sequences. The optimal tree with the sum of branch length = 1.14769493 is shown. The analysis involved 35 nucleotide sequences. There were a total of 670 positions in the final dataset.