Buthus paris (C. L. Koch, 1839)

Sousa, Pedro, Arnedo, Miquel A. & Harris, D. James, 2017, Updated catalogue and taxonomic notes on the Old-World scorpion genus Buthus Leach, 1815 (Scorpiones, Buthidae), ZooKeys 686, pp. 15-84 : 34

43. Buthus paris (C. L. Koch, 1839)

= Androctonus clytoneus : C. L. Koch 1839a: 70-72, pl. CLXIII, fig. 384 (synonymized by Vachon 1949c: 380-381). Types lost; Africa.

Androctonus paris : C. L. Koch 1839a: 25-28, pl. CLI, fig. 352; C. L. Koch 1850: 90.

Androctonus clytonicus (ISS): Gervais 1844a: 43.

Androctonus clytoneus : C. L. Koch 1850: 90.

Buthus occitanus paris: Birula 1903: 107; Birula 1910: 118, 155; Giltay 1929: 196; Werner 1932: 300-305; Vachon 1949c: 380-388, fig. 356, 400, 445-455; Vachon 1951b: 621; Vachon 1952a: 308-316, fig. 356, 400 445-455; Malhomme 1954: 29; Arroyo 1961: 186-189; Le Corroller 1967: 63; Peréz 1974: 23; Levy and Amitai 1980: 16; El-Hennawy 1992: 98, 121; Kovařík 1995: 20; Gantenbein et al. 1998 a: 51; Kovařík 1998: 106; Fet and Lowe 2000: 96; Touloun et al. 2001: 2; Gantenbein and Largiadèr 2003: 120, 122; Touloun 2012: 35, 104, 108, fig.5B.

Buthus (Buthus) occitanus paris: Birula 1910. 145, 155; Birula 1917a: 223.

Buthus paris : Lourenço 2003: 896-897, fig. 52-56; Kovařík 2006: 2, 6, 8, 15, fig. 10-11; Lourenço 2013: 65-66; Rossi, Tropea and Yağmur 2013: 3, 5, 7; Aboumaâd et al. 2014: 6; Touloun et al. 2014: 77-78; Lourenço and Sadine 2016: 14-15.

Type material.

Holotype lost according to Fet and Lowe (2000), Algeria. Vachon (1949c, 1952a) wrote that the types came from Alger without further explanation.

Distribution.

the species is currently distributed across Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.

Remarks.

Because of the description of new species from Algeria, and the lack of both type specimen and locality (beyond the country), a neotype for B. paris is necessary to stabilize the taxonomy of Algerian Buthus , which may challenge the status of some newly described species. This is further complicated by recent diagnoses of B. paris (at least in part: Lourenço 2003, Kovařík 2006, Lourenço and Sadine 2016) that differ from those offered by Vachon (1952a). The differences between the different diagnoses include the number of rows in the movable finger, the aspect ratio of the first metasomal segment, the body chaetotaxie, the aculeus to vesicle length and the type of sexual dimorphism of the pedipalp chelae. Vachon (1952a) studied a large number of specimens from the entire Maghreb region, unrivalled by any subsequent study, which leads us to consider Vachon’s description as the "gold standard". Vachon himself stated that most of the specimens used in his redescriptions were stored at the MNHN. If this material is ever located, it should have priority in the designation of a neotype. Although Vachon (1952a) did not formally describe any varieties within B. paris , he split the specimens that compose the species into three regions: 1) The typical region (from Algiers to northern Tunisia); 2) Specimens from the Oujda region (Morocco); 3) Those from northern Morocco and the Middle Atlas flanks. Interestingly the split of B. paris into these three regions corresponds well with the distribution of the genetic variability in the cox1 gene ( Gantenbein and Largiadèr 2003, Sousa et al. 2012, Pedroso et al. 2013), placing B. paris in two different groups: in occitanus which include all B. paris specimens from regions two and three, and tunetanus , which include B. paris specimens from the typical region one, along the split of the two cox1 groups in the middle of Algeria (Fig. 7). If confirmed, this will mean that B. paris does not occur in Morocco. It is unclear if the variety from the third region above might correspond to B. confluens Lourenço, Touloun & Boumezzough, 2012, although these authors (page 22) refrained from suggesting this possibility because they could not find any of the material used by Vachon, purportedly to be in the MNHN, to describe this variety.