CONSERVATION OF THE NAME TYROPHAGUS PUTRESCENTIAE, A MEDICALLY AND ECONOMICALLY IMPORTANT MITE SPECIES (ACARI: ACARIDAE)

It was recently demonstrated that the taxonomic concept of Tyrophagus putrescentiae (Schrank, 1781), an ubiquitous, agriculturally and medically important mite species, involved two closely related species, and one of them was described as Tyrophagus communis Fan and Zhang, 2007. We show that the prevailing usage of the name T. putrescentiae includes almost exclusively one of these species, and this usage is not in taxonomic accord with the neotype designated by Robertson (1959). We propose that this neotype fixation for the species T. putrescentiae be set aside under Article 75.6 (ICZN, 1999) and a neotype consistent with the prevailing usage be designated. We verified the synonymy of T. putrescentiae (based on the new neotype) after examining the following taxa with extant types: Tyrophagus americanus (Banks, 1906), T. breviceps (Banks, 1906) n. syn, T. cocciphilus (Banks, 1906) n. syn, T. castellanii (Hirst, 1912), T. australasiae (Oudemans, 1916) (tentative synonymy), T. neotropicus Oudemans, 1917, T. amboinensis Oudemans (1925), T. nadinus (Lombardini, 1944), and T. communis Fan and Zhang, 2007, n. syn. For the taxon T. putrescentiae sensu Fan and Zhang (based on the neotype designated by Robertson) a new name is proposed, T. fanetzhangorum, n. sp. Lectotypes are designated for the following species: T. americanus, T. breviceps, T. cocciphilus, T. castellani, T. australasiae, T. neotropicus, T. amboinensis, and T. nadinus.