Sperchon amuzgari Bader & Sepasgosarian 1979

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.