Meleon Wanless, 1984

Azarkina, Galina N. & Logunov, Dmitri V., 2010, New data on the jumping spiders of the subfamily Spartaeinae (Araneae: Salticidae) from Africa, African Invertebrates 51 (1), pp. 163-182 : 170

Genus Meleon Wanless, 1984

This Afrotropical genus currently consists of eight described species (Platnick 2009), occurring from Guinea in the west to Madagascar in the east.

The composition of Meleon requires further study, as the genus seems to be a paraphyletic taxon. According to Wijesinghe (1994), Meleon should consist of only three species: M. guineensis (Berland & Millot, 1941) , M. solitaria (Lessert, 1927) and M. kenti (Lessert, 1925) ; the last is the type species. M. madagascarensis and M. russata , as stated by Wijesinghe (1994), belong elsewhere. The same seems to hold true for two new Meleon species recently described by Logunov and Azarkina (2008), viz. M. insularis and M. raharisonina , as both are closely related to M. madagascarensis . The problem of the taxonomic status and composition of Meleon is outside the scope of the present work and will be considered properly elsewhere by one of us ( DL).