Zygoballus melloleitaoi is a species of jumping spider

Jumping spider

The jumping spider family contains more than 500 described genera and about 5,000 described species, making it the largest family of spiders with about 13% of all species. Jumping spiders have some of the best vision among invertebrates and use it in courtship, hunting and navigation...

 which occurs in Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

. It is known only from a single female specimen collected in Puerto Victoria, Misiones

Misiones Province

Misiones is one of the 23 provinces of Argentina, located in the northeastern corner of the country in the Mesopotamiсa region. It is surrounded by Paraguay to the northwest, Brazil to the north, east and south, and Corrientes Province of Argentina to the southwest.- History :The province was...

.

Taxonomy

The species was originally described in 1945 by Brazilian arachnologist Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão

Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão

Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão, , was a Brazilian zoologist who is considered the founder of Arachnology in South America, publishing 198 papers on the taxonomy of Arachnida...

 as Gastromicans sexpunctata. In 1980, the Argentinian arachnologist María Elena Galiano

María Elena Galiano

María Elena Galiano was an Argentinian arachnologist. She was one of the leading taxonomists of neotropical jumping spiders. Galiano worked at the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires. She died in an accident on October 30, 2000...

 transferred the species to the genus Zygoballus

Zygoballus

Zygoballus is a genus of jumping spiders found in North and South America.-Taxonomy and history:The genus was first described in 1885 by American arachnologists George and Elizabeth Peckham based on the type species Zygoballus rufipes...

. Because the name Zygoballus sexpunctatus

Zygoballus sexpunctatus

Zygoballus sexpunctatus is a species of jumping spider which occurs in the southeastern United States where it can be found in a variety of grassy habitats. Adult spiders measure between 3 and 4.5 mm in length. The cephalothorax and abdomen are bronze to black in color, with reddish brown or...

was already in use, Galiano gave the species a new name, Zygoballus melloleitaoi, in honor of Mello-Leitão. Jerzy Prószyński's Global Species Database of Salticidae lists the species as "dubious". However, it is listed as a recognized species by Platnick's

Norman I. Platnick

Norman I. Platnick is an American arachnologist, and the Peter J. Solomon Family Curator of the invertebrate zoology department of the American Museum of Natural History. A 1973 Ph.D...

 World Spider Catalog (Version 10.5).

Description

The only known specimen is a female 4 mm in length.

The type specimen is housed at the La Plata Museum

La Plata Museum

The La Plata Museum is a natural history museum in La Plata, Argentina.The building, 135 meters long, today houses 3 million fossils and relics , an amphitheatre, opened in 1992, and a 58,000-volume library, serving over 400 university researchers...

in Argentina (Zenzes collection, No. 16.785).

External links

• Zygoballus melloleitaoi at Worldwide database of jumping spiders
• Zygoballus melloleitaoi at Global Species Database of Salticidae (Araneae)