|
2009: 2008: 2007: 2006: 2005: 2004: 2002: | U.S.A. (Arizona, California, New Mexico) 2007 3–17 September, 2007): Funded by the REVSYS grant. PI Lorenzo Prendini and Jeremy Huff flew to El Paso, Texas, and traveled ca. 6,800 km, across the Chihuahua, Sonora and Mojave deserts, the Mogollon Rim, and the Sierra Nevada, and were joined by collaborator Warren Savary in the Central Valley of California prior to their arrival in San Francisco, before returning to New York. The aim of this trip was to collect tissue samples and morphological vouchers of solifuges, vaejovid, iurid and superstitioniid scorpions. The first half of the expedition surveyed pine-oak forest habitats in the ‘Sky Islands’ of New Mexico and Arizona. The second half of the trip focused on collecting endemic vaejovid, iurid and superstitioniid scorpions at lower elevations in the Sonora and Mojave deserts and the Central Valley of California. Although attempts to collect Paruroctonus ammonastes and Vaejovis spicatus near their type localities were unsuccessful, Prendini and Huff successfully collected Hadrurus obscurus at three places, including the type locality of this species in the Panoche Valley, and obtained many other interesting species in the genera Paruroctonus, Serradigitus, and Vaejovis. More than 1,000 specimens were collected in the course of this trip, including 28 scorpion species in eight genera and four families, among them a new species of Paruroctonus and several new species in the Vaejovis vorhiesi group. Solifuge collecting was less successful, with only a few eremobatids encountered along the way. | |
|
