Chelonuropoda Sellnick, 1954

Kontschán, Jenő & Starý, Josef, 2012, Notes on the genus Chelonuropoda Sellnick, 1954 with description of three new species (Acari: Uropodina: Oplitidae), Journal of Natural History 46 (11 - 12), pp. 741-756 : 742-743

Genus Chelonuropoda Sellnick, 1954

Chelonuropoda Sellnick, 1954: 195–196 .

Chelonuropoda: Hirschmann and Zirngiebl-Nicol, 1964: 4 , Hirschmann 1979: 67, Wiśniewski 1993b: 373, Kontschán 2006: 9 , Kontschán 2009a: 737–738.

Oplitis bispirata -group: Hirschmann, 1991: 10–12.

Diagnosis

Idiosoma large (> 1000 µm), oval, posterior margin rounded. Anterior region of marginal shield wide and fused with dorsal shield. Dorsal shield bearing two C-shaped, strongly sclerotized lines on level of coxae IV. Dorsal and ventral setae are smooth and needle-like, sometimes associated with oval pits. Genital shield of female linguliform, without anterior process. Metapodal region with a deep transversal furrows bordered with two rows of phylliform setae. Dorsal, marginal and ventral shields hypertrichous. Corniculi horn-like, laciniae with several long branches. Hypostomal setae h3 longer than others, h2 situated outside the longitudinal row h1–h4. Tritosternum with narrow basis, laciniae with three or four pilose branches. Epistome triangular and marginally pilose. Leg I with claw.

Type species

Chelonuropoda bispirata Sellnick, 1954 by original designation.

Distribution

The species of this genus are recorded from Brazil, Chad, Bolivia ( Wiśniewski 1993a), Angola ( Kontschán 2006) and Kenya ( Kontschán 2009a).

Habitat

All known species were collected from leaf litter.

Remarks

Hirschmann and Zirngiebl-Nicol (1964), in their new system (Gangsystematik) synonymized the genus Chelonuropoda with the genus Oplitis Berlese, 1884 based only

After Kontschán (2009a), modified.

on the processes of the gnathosoma. The first author did not accept this theory so he resurrected the genus Chelonuropoda in his previous work ( Kontschán 2006). The distinguishing characters of these two genera are summarized in Table 1.

Systematic notes

On the basis of the shape of the internal malae (divided into several pilose branches), the absence of T-shaped dorsal setae and strongly sclerotized dorsal pits and rings, we placed this genus into the family Oplitidae ( Lindquist et al. 2009) .

List of the Chelonuropoda species