Abstract
Two new dipluran species of the family Campodeidae have been unearthed in the Canary Islands. Remycampa herbanicasp. nov. was found in a highly threatened lava tube on Fuerteventura island. It is related to the soil-dwelling northwest African Remycampa launeyi that also inhabits four of the Canary Islands. The two known Remycampa species are characterized by a torsion of the labial palps. They differ chiefly in the distribution of macrosetae and in the features of cave adaptation of R. herbanica, i.e. elongation of body and appendages, and a higher number of olfactory chemoreceptors with a coniform shape unique within campodeids. Spaniocampa relictasp. nov. was collected in the mesovoid shallow substratum (MSS) and has been assigned to a formerly monotypic genus that includes the soil-dwelling Spaniocampa prima from the Republic of Guinea. The two species differ in the number of abdominal macrosetae. Females of S. relictasp. nov. have small setae arranged in groups along the posterior border of the first urosternite. These structures of unknown function have never been described in other campodeid species. Sequencing the COI barcode region of R. herbanica has been produced but it proved insufficient to identify closest relatives. The two new hexapods from subterranean habitats raise the Canarian campodeid fauna to six species. Five of them are living in soil and/or MSS, whereas the cave-adapted R. herbanica is known only from a single, particularly endangered lava tube distant from other caves.
Highlights
With almost 1000 known species, Diplura are the second most diverse Entognatha after Collembola (Deharveng and Bedos 2018)
We focused the present study in the Canaries on the lesser known subsurface habitats, i.e. the volcanic caves and the “Milieu Souterrain Superficiel” (Juberthie et al 1980) rather than the soil itself
The substantially cave-adapted Remycampa herbanica sp. nov. is certainly related to the monotypic genus Remycampa Condé, 1952, due to several important taxonomic features including similarities in their atypical labium, secondary sexual characters, lateral telotarsal processes and distribution of macrosetae
Summary
With almost 1000 known species, Diplura are the second most diverse Entognatha after Collembola (Deharveng and Bedos 2018). Fauna in MSS has been successfully surveyed in the Canaries, mostly in the typical colluvial MSS from talus deposits similar to those in continental non-volcanic terrains (Medina and Oromí 1990; Mammola et al 2016), and in the peculiar volcanic MSS formed by lava clinker covered by a layer of protective soil (Oromí et al 1986; Pipan et al 2010) The latter is very abundant in recent and subrecent terrains (a few hundred thousand years) on most islands of the archipelago, providing a widespread subsurface habitat present in areas with or without lava tubes. Further sampling in the MSS of Gran Canaria (Fig. 4) and in an old cave on Fuerteventura has provided the new material of Campodeidae diplurans studied
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