Hygrobates longiporus Thor, 1898

Pešić, Vladimir, Jovanović, Milica, Manović, Ana, Karaouzas, Ioannis & Smit, Harry, 2021, New records of water mites from the Balkans revealed by DNA barcoding (Acari, Hydrachnidia), Ecologica Montenegrina 49, pp. 20-34 : 30

Hygrobates longiporus Thor, 1898

Hygrobates longiporus is a widely distributed species in the Palaearctic, inhabiting various types of standing waters and pools of streams ( Gerecke et al. 2016). We successfully barcoded one specimen from Greece and Serbia, respectively, and two specimens from south-western Turkey, which match the description of H. longiporus . The final alignment for species delimitation using COI sequence data comprised sequences of 7 specimens morphologically assigned to H. longiporus and one specimen of H. meditterraneus (as outgroup). The final alignment consisted of 658 nucleotide positions. The neighbour-joining (NJ) tree is presented in Fig. 5 .

We obtained two haplogroups of H. longiporus ( Fig. 5 ). The first highly supported clade (HygL-I) contains sequences from the Balkans ( Serbia and Greece) and two sequences from Turkey. This clade is placed as the sister clade of specimens from Norway identified also as H. longiporus (HygL-2); the distance (24.3±2.2% K2P) between these clades is very high, suggesting long independent history of these two species.

Hygrobates longiporus was originally described from Norway ( Thor 1898) and can be assumed that this species corresponds to Clade I-type in our analysis. The second clade in our analysis appears to be widespread in the Mediterranean and there is a possibility that this species corresponds to H. falcilaminatus Walter, 1926 . The latter species was originally described from Azrou, Morocco ( Walter 1926), reported from Spain and France, and later on synonymized with H. longiporus by Lundblad (1956) (see also Gerecke 1991 for a discussion about this species). Unfortunately, no sequence is available for H. falcilaminatus . Over the last two years, we have tried in collaboration with Youness Mabrouki ( Morocco) to collect specimens of H. falcilaminatus from its locus typicus, unfortunately without success. This clade should be left unnamed until the sequences of the latter species are available.

Figures

Figure 5. Neighbour-joining tree based on studied Hygrobates longiporus COI sequences.