Holocentropus varangensis Mey, 1987

Holocentropus varangensis Mey, 1987 View in CoL

NORWAY, FI, Sør-Varanger : Varanger Peninsula, lake inlet at tributary 3 of Gjøkvatn , 10 July 1969, 1♂ ( holotype), leg. W. Tobias (the genitalia of the holotype are shown in Figure 3A– C View FIGURES 1–3 ) .

Notes: The holotype is housed in the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History, Görlitz, Germany - not in the Museum of Natural History, Berlin, as stated in Mey (1987). The specimen was originally labelled “ H. insignis ” by Wolfgang Tobias. The abdomen including the genitalia was already cleared in KOH by Mey. The holotype was made available for our study by the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History , Görlitz .

DNA sequencing

With permission from Senckenberg Museum, we attempted to obtain a DNA barcode from one leg of the holotype of H. varangensis . The leg was processed non-destructively, i.e. securing conservation of the exoskeleton. The aim was to obtain a barcode sequence of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene ( COI) to be compared with similar available sequences for H. insignis and H. picicornis (see Boonstra et al. 2018). As the mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited, the barcode of H. varangensis - if this is a hybrid - should be identical to that of one the potential mothers, either H. insignis or H. picicornis . This would strongly support the hybridization hypothesis.

The extraction was carried out by courtesy of the Ecology and Genetics Research Unit, Oulu. The sample was then analyzed ( 28 April 2022) at the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding ( CCDB) (Plate: CCDB-40752; Process-id: LEFIJ28025-22 ). It was then subjected to the “ NGSFT ” protocol as explained in Prosser et al. (2016).