Proctophyllodes troncatus, Robin, 1877

Byers, K. A. & Proctor, H. C., 2014, Like A Glove: Do The Dimensions Of Male Adanal Suckers And Tritonymphal Female Docking Papillae Correlate In The Proctophyllodidae (Astigmata: Analgoidea)?, Acarologia 54 (1), pp. 3-14 : 7

Proctophyllodes troncatus measurements

In the literature, ’docking papillae’ have been associated with the female tritonymph of Proctophyllodes spp. ( Atyeo and Braasch, 1966); however, whether or not females are the only sex to possess these papillae has not been tested. To clarify whether docking papillae were restricted to female tritonymphs and not to any other nymphal stage or sex, we measured the length of the idiosoma in adult male, adult female and nymphal Proctophyllodes troncatus Robin, 1877 captured from house sparrows ( Passer domesticus (Linnaeus)) in Romania ( Figure 1 ). We measured a total of 20 adult male and female P. troncatus , as well as 196 nymphal P. troncatus . Ideally we would have been able to use the number of genital papillae to differentiate between protonymphs (which have one pair) and tritonymphs (which have two pairs), but the slightly degraded nature of the specimens rendered the nymphal genital papillae essentially invisible even under DIC lighting. The presence of two additional pair of ventral setae might also have been used for differentiating tritonymphs from protonymphs ( Gaud and Atyeo, 1996); however, these setae were also difficult to observe, making their consistent use problematic. For all nymphs we determined whether docking papillae were present. We grouped mites into categories for adult males, adult females, nymphs with docking papillae, and nymphs without docking papillae and analyzed the distribution in a histogram produced in SPSS. We tested for differences in size between the adult sexes as well as between nymphs with and without docking papillae using unpaired t-tests. We hypothesized that adult females would be larger than adult males, that adult males would be larger than nymphs and that, if nymphs with docking papillae were tritonymphal females, that these nymphs should be on average larger than nymphs without docking papillae (predicted to be nymphal males or protonymphal females).

Figures

FIGURE 1: Length of the idiosoma in Proctophyllodes spp. in A. female tritonymphs, B. adult females and C. adult males. Measurements (dashed line) were taken from the margin of the prodorsum to the posterior margin of the body. In female tritonymphs we measured the lateral length (A), medial length (B), and width (C) of the docking papillae. In adult males (D; ventral), we measured the distal (D) and basal (E) widths of the adanal suckers as well as sucker depth (F). Line drawings are modeled after Proctophyllodes glandarinus for adults and from Proctophyllodes pari for tritonymphs (Atyeo and Braasch, 1996). Diagrams of the docking papillae and adanal suckers are drawn after scanning electron images published in Witali´nski et al. (1992).