Laelaspis Berlese

Joharchi, Omid, Halliday, Bruce, Saboori, Alireza & Kamali, Karim, 2011, New species and new records of mites of the family Laelapidae (Acari: Mesostigmata) associated with ants in Iran, Zootaxa 2972, pp. 22-36 : 28

Genus Laelaspis Berlese

Laelaps (Laelaspis) Berlese, 1903: 13 . Type species Laelaps astronomicus Koch, 1839 , by original designation.

Diagnosis. Laelapidae with a two-tined palp tarsal claw. Genital shield wide, strongly expanded posterior to coxae IV, its posterior margin rounded, with characteristic ornamentation including two distinct Λ-shaped lines; with two pairs of setae on extreme edges of shield in addition to st 5. Pre-sternal shield usually absent. Genu IV with nine setae including one ventral seta. Dorsal shield setae smooth or slightly serrated, sometimes with paired Zx setae between J and Z series setae, sometimes also with unpaired Jx setae.

Notes on the genus. Laelaspis has often been treated as a subgenus of Hypoaspis , but we here consider it to be a separate genus following recent works such as Lindquist et al. (2009). The differences between Laelaspis and the other discussed in this paper are summarised in Table 1 . The cosmopolitan genus Laelaspis includes about 20 species, which are usually associated with ants ( Hunter, 1961, 1964a). Some species are free-living in soil and litter, such as L. vitzthumi ( Womersley, 1956) ( Hunter, 1964b) or associated with small mammals, such as L. patulus Allred, 1969 . Several species of Laelaspis have been reported from Iran ( Nemati et al., 2000; Kamali et al., 2001; Faraji et al., 2008; Babaeian et al., 2010; Hajizadeh et al., 2010a, 2010b; Nemati & Babaeian, 2010). However, we believe that some of these records are based on misidentifications, or refer to species that should be placed in other genera. These records and others will be discussed in detail in a separate paper on the genus Laelapsis.