Abstract
The wolf spider genus Alopecosa Simon, 1885, contains 160 named species (Platnick 2012) and the type species of the genus is A. fabrilis (Clerck, 1757), which is a Palaearctic species like most species in the genus (Platnick 2012). The taxonomic structure of the genus has been studied in two revisions; Lugetti & Tongiorgi (1969) divided 24 species of European Alopecosa into five species groups and Dondale & Redner (1979) divided seven species from North America into three groups. Many species currently in Alopecosa do not appear to be related to the type species; hence the genus is polyphyletic and should be divided into several genera (Marusik & Kovblyuk 2011). Faunistic revisions of Alopecosa have been produced for Italy (Lugetti & Tongiorgi 1969), Romania (Fuhn & Niculescu-Burlacu 1971), North America (Dondale & Redner 1979), China (Song et al. 1999) and Sweden (Almquist 2005). In the Ukraine and European Russia, 18 and 22 species have been reported, respectively (Mikhailov 1997, 2000). Twenty species of Alopecosa have been described since the year 2000 (Platnick 2012), including one from Central Europe (Czech Republic and Slovakia) (Buchar 2001), one from Greece (Buchar 2001), one from Southwestern Russia and six species from Western Kazakhstan (Ponomarev 2007, 2008, 2009).
References
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