- A new species of short-tailed whip scorpion has been discovered by two arachnologists, Gustavo Ruiz and Roberta Valente of the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil, who described the new species in an article published in the journal PLOS ONE last month.
- The new species belongs to the genus Surazomus in the Hubbardiidae family of the order Schizomida. Schizomids are small arachnids who can typically be found in leaf litter and caves or in the cavities beneath tree bark, logs, and stones in humid tropical and sub-tropical forests; they are commonly known as short-tailed whip scorpions because of the short flagella possessed by both males and females.
- More than 200 Schizomids have been discovered around the world, but the order has not yet been widely studied.
A new species of short-tailed whip scorpion has been discovered in the eastern Amazon.
The discovery was made by two arachnologists, Gustavo Ruiz and Roberta Valente of the Universidade Federal do Pará in Brazil, who described the new species in an article published in the journal PLOS ONE last month.
The new species belongs to the genus Surazomus in the Hubbardiidae family of the order Schizomida. Schizomids are small arachnids who can typically be found in leaf litter and caves or in the cavities beneath tree bark, logs, and stones in humid tropical and sub-tropical forests; they are commonly known as short-tailed whip scorpions because of the short flagella possessed by both males and females.
Ruiz and Valente described the new short-tailed whip scorpion based on a single specimen less than 5 millimeters long collected by arachnologist Regiane Saturnino, in whose honor the species was named Surazomus saturninoae. The specimen was collected with a pitfall trap in primary upland Amazonian rainforest in the Brazilian state of Pará.
According to Ruiz and Valente, the male specimen has a distinctive pentagon-shaped flagellum, similar to three other known Surazomus species. The authors refer to all four species as “the arboreus-group of Surazomus” after the first of the species to be discovered, Surazomus arboreus, which was described to science in 2000.
The flagellum of the Surazomus saturninoae male exhibits “unusual morphology,” the authors write in the paper, affording new insights into the mating habits of all four of the arboreus-group of Surazomus species. The evolutionary drivers behind the different shapes of Surazomus male flagella are still a mystery, as are the mechanisms by which females anchor while mating onto males’ flagella with appendages in front of their mouths called chelicerae, the researchers say.
Two “coupling pockets” discovered to be present on S. saturninoae male flagella might help us better understand the position that the arachnids assume while coupling, a process known as “the mating march.”
“The flagellum of the male is highly modified and held by the chelicerae of the female during copulation, in a phase called as Paarungsmarsch (= mating march), when she is dragged forward onto the spermatophore,” Ruiz and Valente write. “The anchoring mechanism is still poorly understood, but the male flagellum is certainly sexually selected, as it has diverse forms throughout the order in the mating march, in particular, how the female chelicerae anchor onto the male flagellum.”
More than 200 Schizomids have been discovered around the world, but the order has not yet been widely studied.
CITATION
• Ruiz, G. R., & Valente, R. M. (2019). Description of a new species of Surazomus (Arachnida: Schizomida), with comments on homology of male flagellum and mating march anchorage in the genus. PloS one, 14(3), e0213268. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0213268
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