Passiena Thorell, 1890

Omelko, M. M., Yu & Marusik, M., 2020, A new species and new records of wolf spiders (Araneae: Lycosidae) from Laos, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 68, pp. 479-487 : 480

Passiena Thorell, 1890

Type species. Passiena spinicrus Thorell, 1890 , from Malaysia .

Comments. The genus is currently known from four species. Two of them, including the type species P. spinicrus Thorell, 1890 , occur in Southeast Asia, and two others (seemingly misplaced in the genus) are restricted to Africa (WSC, 2020). The type species is known by the holotype female. It was redescribed and illustrated for the first time by Lehtinen (2005). In the same work, Lehtinen (2005) described a new species, P. torbjoerni Lehtinen, 2005 , based on both male and female. The palp of the new species was illustrated but lacked essential details, such as the shape of the intact palp and the shape of the embolic division. Nevertheless, it was the first description of the palp of a Passiena male.

We tried to compare the new species with two other congeners occurring in Asia, but failed to found types listed as deposited in the Natural History Museum in Stockholm and Zoological Museum University of Turku ( Lehtinen, 2005). Fortunately, the junior author has the original illustrations of these species made for Pekka Lehtinen’s publication.