Acanthodactylus boskianus (Daudin, 1802)

Mozaffari, Omid, Mohammadi, Sima, Saberi-Pirooz, Reihaneh & Ahmadzadeh, Faraham, 2021, A new species of Acanthodactylus Fitzinger, 1834 (Sauria: Lacertidae) from the Zagros Mountains, Iran, Zootaxa 5047 (1), pp. 17-32 : 18

Acanthodactylus boskianus in Iran

Acanthodactylus boskianus is the most widespread species of Acanthodactylus (~8 000 000 km 2; Roll et al. 2017). Its type locality is in Egypt ( Anderson 1999; Leviton et al. 1992; Rastegar-Pouyani 1999). Acanthodactylus boskianus has previously been divided into five subspecies: A. b. boskianus (Daudin, 1802) from the Nile delta and parts of Sinai, A. b. asper (Audouin, 1827) from much of the distribution range of the species, A. b. euphraticus Boulenger, 1919, from Mesopotamia, A. b. khattensis Trape & Trape, 2012, from north western side of Africa and A. b. nigeriensis Trape, Chirio & Geniez, 2012, from central Africa. Acanthodactylus schreiberi , its sister species ( Tamar et al. 2016), was described by Boulenger in 1878 and it has been divided into three allopatric subspecies. One of them was A. s. syriacus Böttger, 1879, which inhabits isolated patches of the Eastern Mediterranean coastal areas ( Tamar et al. 2014). Tamar et al. (2016) synonymized A. b. khattensis, A. b. nigeriensis and A. s. syriacus into Acanthodactylus boskianus asper .

In 1999, Acanthodactylus boskianus was reported from Iran for the first time based on morphological characteristics of two adults and one juvenile specimens, but the author was not sure about the identification of the subspecies stating: “These specimens do not entirely fit into the Boulenger’s tripartite key (Boulenger 1919, 1921). Since there is no more material at hand, it may be difficult to say if they represent the fourth form of A. boskianus or not. An adequate intraspecific treatment of A. boskianus is beyond the scope of this paper. Thus, I have chosen not to use a subspecific name for my own material…” ( Rastegar-Pouyani 1999). From this point forward, all Acanthodactylus specimens from the Zagros Mountains in western Iran were considered as A. boskianus . Heidari et al. (2014) investigated all known Acanthodactylus species of Iran using molecular approaches, sampling 11 specimens from four different populations, all from the Zagros Mountains that they identified as A. boskianus (see green points in Fig. 1 ). Based on their work, the level of intraspecific genetic divergence between two A. boskianus populations ( A. boskianus (Z) (from Zarrinabad (Ilam Province )) and A. boskianus (H) (from Harsin and Mehran (Kermanshah and Ilam provinces)) are about 5%, and 4% for Cyt b and ND4 genes, respectively. The authors conclude that as a sign of a species complex or existence of different taxonomic units at the subspecific level in Iran.

Recently, during re-identification of our collection, we found two specimens collected in 2005 that were also identified as A. boskianus . Further analysis revealed morphological differences between these two specimens and the typical A. boskianus , while presenting similarity to other Iranian specimens of A. boskianus described from the western side of the country. In this study, we assessed morphological and molecular variation of these two specimens from Iran and describe a new species of the genus from the western part of the Zagros Mountains .

Figures

FIGURE 1. Type locality of Acanthodactylus zagrosicus sp. nov. (ZFMK103173(♂) and ZFMK103174(♀)) along with distri- bution of all boskianus group species. For more details, see Table 1.