Anopsobiella dawidoffi

Anopsobiella dawidoffi Attems, 1938

Anopsobiella dawidoffi Attems, 1938: 35; Zapparoli & Edgecombe, 2011: 377

The genus Anopsobiella was originally described as a subgenus of Anopsobius, which given the unique characters of the single included species, seems a remarkable decision on Attems’ part. The single species was described from an unspecified number of specimens collected at Caùda, Nha Trang, Khanh Hoa Province, Vietnam. Nha Trang is a resort city on the coast in southern Vietnam, and Caùda is a headland projecting into Nha Trang Bay. If A. dawidoffi is in fact an anopsobiid, it is strikingly different from the other members of the family (and all Henicopidae as well) in having very strongly modified penultimate (14th) and ultimate (15th) legs in the male. Both these leg-pairs are shown in Attems’ drawings (his Figs. 319 and 320) as thickened and with the tibiae considerably swollen; in the penultimate leg, the distal tarsal article is attached to a swollen proximal article on its ventral side—about ¼ the length of the first article from its termination—but in the ultimate leg the bisegmented tarsus is attached in this manner to the tibia (or at least that is what the drawings seem to show). The same drawings also show that there are no distal spines on the coxae of the last pair of legs. Prunescu & Prunescu (2004) also provided drawings of these legs that are perhaps a bit more accurate, but which omit the coxae. Attems (1938) states that spiracles occur on pedigerous segments 4, 6, 9, 11 and 13, but this is surely an error, which Zapparoli & Edgecombe (2011) correct to 3, 5, 8, 10, and 14. Single ventrodistal spurs are present on the prefemora, femora, and tibiae of leg-pairs 9–13, and tibial spines occur on legpairs 1–13. Given these departures from the usual characters of Anopsobiidae, it seems likely that A. dawidoffi is not a member of the family. The type specimens of A. dawidoffi can no longer be found, except for one very immature example (N. Akkari, pers. comm. 2018). Prunescu & Prunescu (2004) destroyed at least one of the male types (NHMW 3815) in their histological study of the male genital system.