Ceratophysella armata, (Nicolet, 1842)

Babenko, Anatoly, Stebaeva, Sophya & Turnbull, Matthew S., 2019, An updated checklist of Canadian and Alaskan Collembola, Zootaxa 4592 (1), pp. 1-125 : 15

C. armata ( Nicolet, 1842)

– Podura armata Nicolet, 1842: 57

AK Weber 1950; Maynard 1951; Hurd & Lindquist 1958; Ryan 1981; Fjellberg 1985; Skidmore 1995; Babenko & Fjellberg 2006

YT Hammer 1953

NT Weber 1950; Hammer 1953; Skidmore 1995

NU Folsom 1919a; Hammer 1938, 1953, 1953a; Mills & Richards, 1953; Oliver 1963, cf.; Addison 1975; Ryan 1977, cf., 1981 BC Spencer 1948; Maynard 1951; MacNay 1957; Skidmore 1995; Cannings 2010

AB McGuffin 1950; Beirne 1972

MB McClure 1943; Hammer 1953; Mills & Sinha 1971; Aitchison 1979; Skidmore 1995; Lindo 2014

ON Folsom 1916; Brown 1934; Weber 1950; Skidmore 1995

QC Marshall 1964, 1967, cf.; Pielou & Verma 1968, cf.; Matthewman & Pielou 1971

Remarks: Despite numerous records of this species, the presence of true C. armata in Nearctic is still questionable. Christiansen & Bellinger (1980, p. 143) believed that “all Nearctic records [of C. armata ] are suspect”. Fjellberg (1985, p. 35) wrote that “I have compared specimens from Alaska and NE Siberia with material from Switzerland and France and find no sharp differences except in one important detail: European specimens have only one sublobal hair on maxillary lobe, whereas Alaskan/Siberian specimens have two like most other Ceratophysella with B chaetotaxy”. There is also a remark in Babenko & Fjellberg (2006, p. 9) that the authors “are not sure that specimens from eastern Palaearctic and Nearctic tundras are conspecific with European C. armata ”. It is highly probable that the majority of old records of the species, at least from the northern parts of Canada, may be just misidentifications of C. denticulata , as is the case for Greenland ( Fjellberg 2015).

General distribution: Holarctic, but not certain due to probable confusion with other congeners.