Hippasa deserticola Simon, 1889

Al-Khazali, Azhar Mohammed, Kachel, Hamid Saeid, Zamani, Alireza & Hussen, Fenik Sherzad, 2023, An updated and annotated checklist of the spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) of Iraq, Zootaxa 5339 (2), pp. 132-158 : 139

Hippasa deserticola Simon, 1889

Records: Baghdad, Basrah ( Tikader & Malhotra 1980; Najim et al. 2019 [both sub H. pisaurina Pocock, 1900 ; see “Comment”]; Najim & Al-Hadlag 2022 [sub H. cinerea Simon, 1898 ; see “Comment”]).

Distribution: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh.

Comment: The Iraqi records of H. pisaurina by Tikader & Malhotra (1980) and Najim et al. (2019) and that of H. cinerea by Najim & Al-Hadlag (2022) are herein attributed to H. deserticola , a species previously reported not far from the Iraqi border in Iran. It has already been suggested by Marusik & Nadolny (2021) that H. pisaurina should most likely be synonymized with H. deserticola due to their almost identical conformation of the epigyne and vulva; also, the range of H. pisaurina (even if it remains a valid species) is otherwise restricted to South Asia. Hippasa cinerea is a junior synonym of H. partita (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1876) , a species unknown outside of Africa.