Lycosa accentuata, LATREILLE, 1817

Breitling, Rainer & Bauer, Tobias, 2022, What, if anything, is Lycosa accentuata Latreille, 1817? - Review of a nomenclatural conundrum (Araneae: Lycosidae), Zoosystema 44 (8), pp. 197-207 : 203-205

NEOTYPE DESIGNATION FOR LYCOSA ACCENTUATA LATREILLE, 1817

TYPE MATERIAL LOST. — Locus typicus: “environs de Paris”

NEOTYPE. — France • 1 ♀; Ermitage de Franchard, forêt de Fontainebleau , 48°24’28”N, 2°37’44”E; 27.V.2018; C. Jacquet leg.; MNHN-AR-AR16223 .

DESCRIPTION OF FEMALE NEOTYPE ( Fig. 2 )

Prosoma brown, with a complete, wide and yellowish median stripe ending between the PME. Laterally with yellowish and slightly serrated stripes completely covering the margins of the prosoma. Chelicerae dark brown. Proximal part of maxillae brownish, distal part more yellowish brown. Labium brown, distal margin yellowish. Sternum light brown, with a longitudinal median stripe of yellow colour, broadened at the centre. Opisthosoma dorsal greyish brown, cardiac mark slightly darker and more greyish, with thin yellowish frame. Spinnerets dark brown, distinctly darker than ventral side. Coxae in ventral view light yellowish.Legs brownish. Prosoma length 5.4 mm, width 3.9 mm, Opisthosoma length 6.0 mm, anterior eye row 0.91 mm, median eye row 1.07 mm, posterior eye row 1.33 mm, diameter of AME 0.13 mm, PME 0.34 mm, ALE 0.12 mm, PLE 0.3 mm. Distance between PLE-PLE 0.99 mm, PME-PME 0.4 mm, ALE-ALE 0.64 mm, ALEAME 0.12 mm, AME-AME 0.18 mm, ALE-PME 0.22 mm. For measurements of legs, see Table 3.

REMARK

Geographical distribution, habitat, size, colouration and phenology of Alopecosa trabalis agree with the description of Lycosa accentuata provided by Latreille (1817). No other lycosid species is a similarly plausible match to the original description. The selected neotype thus meets the requirements of ICZN Article 75.3.5. The restricted locus typicus in the forêt de Fontainebleau is within the “environs de Paris”, as confirmed by contemporary travel guides (e.g. Dulaure 1827; Anonymous 1855). Thus, the requirements of ICZN Article 75.3.6 are met as well. The neotype designation stabilises the interpretation of Lycosa accentuata , and in consequence the nomenclature of the sibling species pair Alopecosa barbipes / A. farinosa .

PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES OF (MIS)APPLYING LYCOSA ACCENTUATA LATREILLE, 1817 , TO THE ATLANTIC SIBLING SPECIES, INVERTING PREVIOUS ESTABLISHED USAGE

While mere preferences based on the traditional use of names should not be used to justify violations of the code of nomenclature, which ultimately can only result in increased instability and confusion, it is important to take prevailing usage into account when making reasonable judgement calls in doubtful cases. In the present case, it is relevant to point out that Alopecosa farinosa and A. barbipes are frequently caught in pitfall traps and are an important part of epigeal spider communities inhabiting dry open habitats across their range; as a result they figure widely in ecological and faunistic studies. Following Dahlem et al. (1987) and Cordes & von Helversen (1990), and until the publication by Breitling et al. (2016), the names A. accentuata and A. barbipes were almost uniformly applied to the Eastern/Continental and Western/ Atlantic form of the sibling pair, respectively, throughout the ecological and faunistic literature (e.g. Entling et al. 2007; Schmitt 2008; Buchholz & Kreuels 2009; Buchar & Dolanský 2011; Cruveillier 2012). The same was the case for authoritative country checklists (e.g. Merrett & Millidge 1992; Alderweireldt & Maelfait 1993; van Helsdingen 1996; Le Peru 2007; Blick et al. 2016), all of which specifically refer to the recent splitting of the sibling species pair. Other checklists do also list both species ( A. accentuata and A. barbipes ), but the lack of a critical discussion leaves it open whether this is intentional, or a result of the historical ambiguity of usage (e.g. Blagoev 2002; Canard 2005; Cardoso & Morano 2010).

Moreover, various scientific articles on cryptic species and behavioural isolation in wolf spiders also use the nomenclature of Dahlem et al. (1987), e.g. Töpfer-Hofmann et al. (2000), Vink & Mitchell (2002), Framenau & Hebets (2007). This follows the standard practice in the arachnological literature of applying the nomenclature adopted in the World Spider Catalog, first edited by Norman Platnick and now hosted by the University of Bern, Switzerland. The availability of these online catalogues as an internationally accepted point of reference has contributed immensely to stabilizing spider nomenclature. The catalogue adopted the nomenclature of Dahlem et al. from 2001 onwards (version 2.0, the first version covering the Lycosidae ), and additional stability was achieved as the most important modern identification guide for European spiders did the same ( Roberts 1995, 1998), followed in due course by the current major resource for the identification of European spiders, the Spiders of Europe website ( Nentwig et al. 2010 et seq.).

Using Google Scholar, we were able to identify dozens of ecological or faunistic publications from a wide range of journals, as well as the grey literature, in which the name A. barbipes (or rarely Tarentula barbipes ) has been unequivocally applied to the Atlantic sibling species after 1990. This includes citation classics such as Buchholz (2010) and Entling et al. (2007). We also found dozens of publications in which the name A. accentuata was used specifically for the Continental sibling after 1990. Not in all cases was it clear whether this use was accidental, or whether the authors were simply unaware of the existence of two sibling species. However, we did not find a single example of a publication using A. accentuata exclusively for the Atlantic species only, in explicit contrast to its continental sibling. This consistent use at an international level and across a diverse range of publications contradicts the assessment by Canard & Cruveillier (2019), who seem to imply that the name A. accentuata had been used consistently for the Atlantic sibling species, at least by French authors. This is not the case, and this view is contradicted not only by the French standard checklist ( Le Peru 2007), but even by their own publications (e.g. Cruveillier 2012; Lafage et al. 2015).

The re-naming of A. accentuata as A. farinosa and the maintained usage of A. barbipes , as proposed by Breitling et al. (2016), have been widely accepted by the community (e.g. Just et al. 2018; Naumova et al. 2019). From the point of view of database curation and unambiguous information retrieval, this name change was much less problematic than would be the proposed transfer of the name A. accentuata from one sibling to the other. Especially checklists and faunistic databases are extremely susceptible to honest mistakes based on such a switch of names, and future confusion, e.g., by accidental attributions of historic records of A. farinosa listed under the name accentuata to the Atlantic species, would be inevitable and would create a major impediment in many areas for future scientific work on this fascinating pair of sibling species.

Figures

FIG. 2. — Neotype of Lycosa accentuata Latreille, 1817 (junior subjective synonym of Araneus trabalis Clerck, 1757) from forêt de Fontainebleau near Paris: A, dorsal view; B, ventral view; C, epigyne in situ. Scale bars: A, B, 5 mm; C, 0.2 mm.