Ploiaria Scopoli, 1786

Pansare, Pratik P., Ghate, Hemant V. & Webb, Mick, 2018, Redescription of the thread-legged assassin bug Ploiaria anak (Hemiptera: Heteroptera: Reduviidae: Emesinae) from India, with notes on its biology, Zootaxa 4388 (4), pp. 557-566 : 558

Genu s Ploiaria Scopoli, 1786

Ploiaria Scopoli, 1786: 60 . Type species by monotypy: P. domestica Scopoli, 1786 . For full synonymy see Maldonado-Capriles (1990: 108).

Remarks There are about 20 species of Ploiaria in the Oriental Region ( Rédei 2008), two of which are published records for India, i.e., P. anak Distant, 1909 and P. nuda Ravichandran & Livingstone, 1989 .The Indian record of the Afrotropical species P. soudanica Dispons, 1960 ( Ambrose 2006) has not been subsequently confirmed and it is likely based on misidentification; a species superficially similar to P. soudanica has been recently collected by us and is currently under examination (see Discussion). Neither P. nuda nor P. soudanica appear in the key of Rédei (2008) where P. anak and three other species are distinguished by a prominent spine on the trochanter. P. anak can be distinguished from these other similar species by its distinctly granulate head ( Rédei 2008). The texture of the head was omitted from the description of P. nuda as was the habitus figure given earlier in its unpublished thesis description ( Ravichandran 1988).

Regarding the specific epithet of the Ploiaria species described by Ravichandran & Livingstone (1989), it appears three times in the text (p. 125), spelled once as nuda and twice as nude ; the word probably relates to the absence of a spine on the fore trochanter. Prior to its description, it was referred to as P. nuda in Ravichandran’s (1988) unpublished thesis (suggesting nude was a typographical error in the original description) and subsequently it was listed as P. nuda in Ambrose’s (2006: 2396) checklist but as P. nude in the Web Supplement of the same ( Ambrose, 2006: v). This species was omitted from Maldonado Capriles’s (1990) catalogue (although Ploiaria nuda Miller was synonymized as Paraluteva nuda (Miller) on page 208); but it was included as P. nude in Kerzhner’s (1992: 58) corrections to that catalogue. We are unaware of any valid selection of correct original spelling as First Reviser Act either under Art. 24.2.3 or 24.2.4. of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature ( ICZN 1999). The decision on which spelling to use is made more complicated as another P. nuda was described by Miller (1950: 191), albeit now placed in a different genus (Paraluveta Villiers). Due to this fact, retaining the spelling nude was considered but as a non-Latin word its use would need to be considered as an arbitrary combination of letters which, being an English word, is hardly applicable. Therefore, acting as the First Reviser under Art. 24.2.3, we consider it prudent to select nuda as the correct original spelling, rather than nude , and being a junior homonym, to replace P. nuda with the new name P. raviaspinosa nom. nov. Etymology: The new specific epithet is the concatenation of ‘ravi’, the first part of G. Ravichandran’s surname, meaning ‘sun’ in Hindi and ‘aspinosa’, Latin adjective meaning ‘without a spine’ (to better emphasize the lack of a spine on the fore trochanter).