Brontispalaelaps leveri Womersley 1956

Masan, Peter, 2017, A revision of the family Ameroseiidae (Acari, Mesostigmata), with some data on Slovak fauna, ZooKeys 704, pp. 1-228 : 1

Brontispalaelaps leveri Womersley 1956

Brontispalaelaps leveri Womersley, 1956a: 533.

Brontispalaelaps leveri . - Silva et al. 2014: 710.

Type depository.

South Australian Museum, Adelaide, Australia.

Type locality and habitat.

Pacific Ocean Region, Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, Tenaru, on coconut leaf beetle, Brontispa longissima (as Brontispa froggatti ) ( Coleoptera , Chrysomelidae ), found in coconut leaves.

Remarks.

Some important amendments to the original description of Brontispalaelaps leveri were carried out by Halliday (1997) and Silva et al. (2014). This species was described from specimens associated with the chrysomelid beetle Brontispa froggatti Sharp, 1904 [= Brontispa longissima (Gestro, 1885)] from the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. It is remarkable that the type specimens of Ameroseius crassipes were collected from the same host beetle in Australia. For that reason there may be some speculation about conspecificity of A. crassipes and B. leveri , the type species of the genus Brontispalaelaps . The conspecificity of both species should be carefully checked by further study once more, despite of the fact that Lindquist’s examination of the type specimens has shown that A. crassipes belongs to an unspecified genus of Ologamasidae ( Halliday 1997).