Bonnetina rudloffi, VOL, 2001

BONNETINA RUDLOFFI VOL, 2001 , NOMEN DUBIUM

( FIG. 1; TABLE 1)

urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:DB2A34BF-9EA7-45DE-ADEA-554E3FC8B8E

Bonnetina rudloffi Vol, 2001 a: 7 , figs 1–6. Peters, 2003: 102, figs 406. Peters, 2005 b: 39, figs 114–118. Estrada-Alvarez & Locht, 2011: 154, fig. 13.

Remarks: This species was described based on a single male, supposedly collected in Arteaga (Arteaga municipality, Michoacán State) by H. U. Rechsteiner ( Vol, 2001), a person who is known to smuggle tarantulas into the European pet trade. Wildlife traffickers usually lie about the provenance of their specimens, to avoid competition. The holotype of B. rudloffi was supposed to be deposited at MNHNP ( Vol, 2001), but both the curator of the collection Christine Rollard (personal communication, 2015) and the arachnologist Jorge Mendoza (personal communication, 2015) failed to locate it there. The original description of B. rudloffi is verbose, but we did not find any characters that help to establish its species-level identity, and the images included are of poor quality. The Michoacán and Guerrero sub-coastal areas, where Arteaga is located, are one of the main Bonnetina hotspots (in this contribution, we are describing three new species from a small geographic area there) ( Fig. 1; Table 1). Finally, Arteaga has been included for some years in the epicentre of drug cartel wars and the fight of Mexican society against the drug illegal trade. This fact has turned Arteaga in an unsafe place to visit. For all these reasons, we think that there is currently no credible way to clarify the identity of B. rudloffi and to remove the taxonomic instability that it causes in the group, so we declare the species a nomen dubium.