The northernmost Palearctic scorpion

Abstract

Reserve. Molecular data indicate that the populations is M. bogdoensis (Birula, 1896). Material and methodsThe field collection was performed by the first author (N.P.). On 13 August 2021, 10 scorpion specimens were collected with the help of UV light at night on a slope of the Karagashta Ravine, 1 km from Aituar Village, Kuvandyk District, Orenburg Province, Russian Federation (51.1072°N, 57.6606°E), within the Aituar Steppe area of the Orenburg Nature Reserve. The specimens were found in dry grass-tussock stony steppe habitat (Fig. 2). DNA extraction, amplification, and sequencing of the COI gene for this population were also performed by the first author (N.P.) according to the methods published earlier [Poverennyi, Anikin, 2020a, b]. The new single Aituar COI sequence was deposited in GenBank under accession number OM905082. This sequence was added to 23 sequences belonging to five other congeneric species, which represented a subset of 98 sequences recently used for revision of genus Mesobuthus [Kovařík et al., 2022] (see Fig. 1 legend for details). The phylogenetic analysis of the combined dataset was performed by the second author (M.R.G.) The mitochondrial COI sequence data were aligned using MUSCLE [Edgar, 2004] in the AliView 1.7.1 software package [Larsson, 2014] using default parameters. Successful alignment of the sequences was confirmed visually and ends were trimmed manually in AliView. Phylogenetic relationships were estimated by implementing the criteria of Maximum Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Inference (BI). In the ML analysis, IQTREE version 1.6.6 [Nguyen et al., 2015] was used, allowing the software to select optimum substitution models with ModelFinder [Kalyaanamoorthy et al., 2017]. Node support was calculated ABSTRACT. This note addresses the northernmost (above 51°N) Palearctic scorpion population of the Aituar Steppe in the Orenburg Nature Reserve, Russia. According to our original COI mtDNA analysis, this population is Mesobuthus bogdoensis (Birula, 1896) (Buthidae).