Torrenticola baueri Bader & Sepasgozarian, 1987

Pešić, Vladimir, Zawal, Andrzej, Saboori, Alireza & Smit, Harry, 2021, New records of water mites (Acari, Hydrachnidia) from Iran with the description of one new species based on morphology and DNA barcodes, Zootaxa 5082 (5), pp. 425-440 : 435-436

Torrenticola baueri Bader & Sepasgozarian, 1987

Torrenticola barsica — Asadi et al. 2010: 45

Material examined — Iran, Golestan Province, Shirabad near Khanbebin, stream, downstream near bridge, gravel, 36.967499 N, 55.027779 E, 27.viii.2017 leg. Pešić, Zawal & Saboori, 3♂ (1♂ sequenced [ DCDDJ067-21 ], dissected and slide mounted [ CCDB 38361 F07]) .

Remarks— Torrenticola baueri was described by Bader & Sepasgozarian (1987) from a stream in Elburs mountain of North Iran. The authors compared T. baueri with the morphologically distant T. anomala , but were not aware of the close similarity to T. barsica . Laster on, Asadi et al. (2010) re-examined the holotype of T. baueri and found that this species matches the morphology and measurement ranges of Torrenticola barsica (Szalay, 1933) , a species widely distributed in the Western Palaearctic. The only difference was found in a slightly shorter medial suture Cx-II+III in male (97 µm in T. baueri vs. 105-110 µm in T. barsica ). As a result the latter authors synonymized T. baueri with T. barsica .

During our 2017 survey in Northern Iran we collected several specimens of barsica -like mites which morphologically match the original description of T. baueri and measurements given by Asadi et al. (2010). One specimen [CCDB 38361 F07] was successfully barcoded and used for species delimitation.

For the final alignment of species delimitation using COI sequence data we used the 34 Torrenticola specimens listed in Table 7 and one outgroup, Monatractides persicus Pešić, 2004 to root the tree. The neighbor-joining (NJ) tree is presented in Fig. 7 . The COI sequence retrieved from the Torrenticola baueri specimen collected in Iran was recovered as sister to T. barsica ( Fig. 7 ). The average K2P genetic distance between the COI sequence of the specimen of T. baueri from Iran and two specimens of T. barsica from Montenegro was 17.4% suggesting a long independent history of these two species. Therefore, we resurrected T. baueri as a valid species distinct from T. barsica .

Distribution— Iran.

Figures

FIGURE 7. Neighbor-joining tree based on studied Torrenticola COI sequences. The optimal tree with the sum of branch length = 1.18947924 is shown. The analysis involved 36 nucleotide sequences. There were a total of 669 positions in the final dataset.