Introducing the second volume on the ontogeny and morphological diversity in immature mites

Abstract

Immature mites are much less known than their adults, although they may also provide a diversity of characters and other information useful for understanding mite classification and phylogeny (Zhang et al. 2018). A recent survey of taxonomic papers published on mites from 2015 to 2017 showed that only 10% of these contained descriptions of immature stages in addition to adults and as few as 3% included data on all life stages (Liu & Zhang 2018). To address this imbalance, this series of special volumes is designed to promote studies on the ontogeny and morphological diversity in immature mites, with a special focus on the comparative morphology of all life stages. The first volume was a success and published last year (Zhang et al. 2018). It received strong support from numerous colleagues who shared the interest in ontogeny and immature mites (Bayartogtokh & Ermilov 2018; Castro et al. 2018; Gerdeman et al. 2018; Li et al. 2018; Liu & Zhang 2018; Ma et al. 2018; A. Seniczak & S. Seniczak 2018a; S. Seniczak & A. Seniczak 2018; Xu et al. 2018; Yi et al. 2018). This second volume matched the first volume in size (just a few pages longer), including 5 papers on Oribatida (Bayartogtokh & Ermilov 2019a,b; Ermilov et al. 2019; S. Seniczak et al. 2019a,b), three papers on Trombidiformes (Costa et al. 2019; Seeman 2019; Xu et al. 2019) and one paper on Mesostigmata (Moraza 2019). It is a delight to see the return of many authors form the first volume as well as some new authors. The third volume is in preparation, to accommodate some papers that missed the deadline for this volume and some new submissions. It is encouraging to see to an increasing interest in mite ontogeny here and elsewhere: e.g. the largest mite journal “Systematic and Applied Acarology” published over 100 taxonomic papers in 2018 and 15% of these provided descriptions of all life stages, including 10 papers by the Seniczak team alone (A. Seniczak & S. Seniczak 2018b; A. Seniczak A. et al. 2018a–d; S. Seniczak 2018 et al. 2018a–e).