Solenysa mellotteei Simon, 1894

Wang, Fang, Ono, Hirotsugu & Tu, Lihong, 2015, A review of Solenysa spiders from Japan (Araneae, Linyphiidae), with a comment on the type species S. mellotteei Simon, 1894, ZooKeys 481, pp. 39-56 : 44

Taxon classification Animalia Araneae Linyphiidae

Solenysa mellotteei Simon, 1894 Figs 2, 4 A–B, 6A

Solenysa mellottei Simon, 1894: 677; Lee et al. 2004: 100; Ono et al. 2009: 330, figs 1087-1091.

Solenysa mellotteei : Yaginuma 1986: 78, fig. 42.2; Irie and Saito 1987: 23, fig. 21; Chikuni 1989: 56, fig. 48.

Solenysa akihisai : Tu and Hormiga 2011: 499, fig. 8 A–I.

Material examined.

1♂ and 1♀ (NSMT-Ar 11154), Japan, Honshu, Kanagawa Prefecture, Kawasaki-shi, Asao-ku, Kurokawa, 35°32'N, 139°43'E, 15 Nov. 1997, coll. Mitsuru Ban; 1♂ and 2♀♀, Japan, Honshu, Tokyo, Hachioji, 35°42'N, 139°18'E, 20 Dec. 2003, coll. Akihisa Andoh; 3♂♂ and 3♀♀ (CNU-J02), Japan, Honshu, Ibaraki Prefecture, Mito-shi, Tara, 36°24.35'N, 140°24.55'E, 27 Nov. 2000, coll. Akihisa Andoh; 3♂♂ and 7♀♀, Japan, Honshu, Tokyo, Hachioji, Kamikawa, 35°42.55'N, 139°15.23'E, alt. 230 m, 9 Nov. 2008, coll. Akihisa Andoh; 5♂♂ and 2♀♀ (CNU-J22), Japan, Honshu, Kanagawa Prefecture, Miura, Ko-ajiro, 35°09.88'N, 139°37.65'E, alt. 20 m, 1 Mar. 2008, coll. Akihisa Andoh; 2♂♂ (CNU-J32), Japan, Honshu, Ibaraki Prefecture, Mito, Tano, 36°24.55'N, 140°24.38'E, alt. 45 m, 13 Jun. 2009, coll. Akihisa Andoh.

Diagnosis.

Solenysa mellotteei is similar to Solenysa partibilis and Solenysa ogatai in male palps having the posterior branch of lamella characteristica (LC3) divided into two parts (Fig. 6A, C, D), and in females having an apple-shaped epigyne. Males can be distinguished by: the anterior part of LC3 is flag-shaped in Solenysa mellotteei (Fig. 2B), long spike-shaped in Solenysa ogatai (Fig. 3C) and Solenysa partibilis (Fig. 3D); the posterior part of LC3 S-curved in Solenysa ogatai (Fig. 3C), L-curved in Solenysa partibilis (Fig. 3D). Females can be distinguished by the inverse triangular epigynal collar and the dorsal plate as wide as long in Solenysa mellotteei (Fig. 4A, Tu and Hormiga 2011: fig. 8I), the dorsal plate wider than long in Solenysa partibilis and Solenysa ogatai (Fig. 5B, D), and the epigynal collar more than four times wider than long in Solenysa ogatai (Fig. 5B), less than twice wider than long in Solenysa partibilis ( Tu and Hormiga 2011: fig. 11I).

Description.

Solenysa mellotteei has somatic morphology typical of Solenysa (Fig. 1A, B, E) and a genital pattern of the Solenysa mellotteei group (Fig. 2 A–B). For somatic and genital characters, see the description provided by Tu and Hormiga (2011) for Solenysa akihisai , the junior synonym of Solenysa mellotteei .

Distribution.

Japan (Honshu, Fig. 7).

Comments.

The problem with the identification of the generotype Solenysa mellotteei arose because Solenysa species occurring in Japan, previously all identified as Solenysa mellotteei , are now distinguished as six species. Since most of them have restricted distributions without any overlap (Fig. 7), it has long remained ambiguous which species is the original Solenysa mellotteei described by Simon (1894). The type material of Solenysa mellotteei was not located ( Tu and Li 2006), and the original description by Simon (1894) did not provide detailed information about the type locality. According to Ono (2011), the French diplomat A. Mellottée, who had spent only two years in Japan, stayed in the foreign settlement at Yokohama and collected spiders in the surrounding area. All his collections were contributed to the National Museum of Natural History, Paris ( Ono 1987, Takahashi 2000) and studied by Simon (1886a, 1886b, 1889, 1893, 1894, 1895). For that reason, Ono (2011) inferred the type locality of Solenysa mellotteei should be Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture. In the first review of the genus by Tu and Li (2006), the redescription of Solenysa mellotteei was based on a pair of specimens sent by a Japanese scholar and did not include any collecting data. In the phylogenetic revision of Solenysa ( Tu and Hormiga 2011), the supplementary material of the same species did not come from the type locality, but from Esuzaki, Susami-cho, Wakayama Prefecture. However, specimens collected from Hachioji, Tokyo, which is much closer to the type locality (Fig. 7), were proposed as a new species Solenysa akihisai . In the present study we examined material collected from three localities adjacent to Yokohama: Hachioji, Kawasaki (NSMT-Ar 11154) and Miura (Fig. 7), as well as specimens from Mito, and found that they are the same species, which should bear the generotype name Solenysa mellotteei , and Solenysa akihisai is a junior synonym of it. The materials collected from Wakayama Prefecture, and those from Shikoku Island are proposed here as a new species Solenysa trunciformis sp. n.