Pterodectes Robin, 1877

Mironov, Sergey V., Literak, Ivan & Čapek, Miroslav, 2008, New feather mites of the subfamily Pterodectinae (Acari: Astigmata: Proctophyllodidae) from passerines (Aves: Passeriformes) in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, Zootaxa 1947, pp. 1-38 : 4

Genus Pterodectes Robin, 1877

Until the beginning of 1970s, the genus Pterodectes accumulated almost all pterodectine species in recent sense. When Park and Atyeo (1971) established a new subfamily, Pterodectinae , and arranged nearly one hundred of “ Pterodectes ” species known up to that time into 12 genera, the species content of the genus Pterodectes was reduced to nine species. After this revision, ten more species have been described in the context of Pterodectes (Č erný 1974; Atyeo & Gaud 1977; OConnor et al. 2005; Hernandes & Valim 2005, 2006). Representatives of this genus were recorded from passerines of eleven families: Cardinalidae , Corvidae , Cotingidae , Emberizidae , Furnariidae , Hirundinidae , Icteridae , Parulidae , Thraupidae , Troglodytidae , Turdidae , and Tyrannidae . All species associated with passerines, except for Pterodectes rutilus Robin, 1877 living generally on swallows of the genus Hirundo Linnaeus, 1858 (Hirundinidae) , are known from the New World.

Regarding the species content of Pterodectes , it is necessary to point out that P. ralliculae Atyeo et Gaud, 1977 , described from rails ( Gruiformes : Rallidae ) in New Guinea and provisionally placed by its authors in this genus, quite certainly does not belong to it. By the structure of the male genital apparatus (the posterior position of genital papillae relative to the genital arch), P. ralliculae is definitely much closer to the genus Montesauria Oudemans, 1905 than to Pterodectes and probably deserves to be placed in a separate genus. Besides, P. interifolia Trouessart, 1899 , described from Rupicola peruviana (Latham, 1790) ( Passeriformes : Cotingidae ), also should be moved to a new genus (M. Valim and F. Hernandes, personal communication), because male specimens have quite unusual opisthosomal lobes for a typical Pterodectes species. Even excluding these two named species from the genus Pterodectes , host-associations of this genus with phylogenetically distant passerine families, belonging both to oscines and suboscines, retain some doubts that the genus Pterodectes in recent concept is monophyletic. Valim and Hernandes (2006) redescribed most Pterodectes species described by Berla (1958, 1959a, 1959c, 1960), nevertheless all other pterodectine species described by other authors before the 1980s ( Trouessart 1885; Stoll 1893; Banks 1909; Č erný 1974) need a redescription and confirmation of their systematic position within the Pterodectinae .