Description of a New Wolf Spider in the Genus Pirata (Araneae: Lycosidae)

The genus Pirata Sundevall consists of rather small, active wolf spiders that frequent the vegetation of bogs, swamps, margins of ponds and streams, and, more rarely, salt marshes. In a recent revision, Wallace and Exline (1978) divided the North American species of Pirata into groups based on genitalia, body size, leg setation, and color pattern on the carapace. Their insularis group contained two species, namely, P. insularis Emerton, which ranges from the western part of the Northwest Territories to New Brunswick and southward to Arizona and Florida, and P. cantralli Wallace and Exline, which was known only from Michigan and Ontario. Subsequent collections of cantralli indicate that it ranges as widely in Canada as insularis, though southward only to Michigan. Wallace and Exline (1978) noted the presence of a prominent, basally-directed tooth on the median apophysis of the male palpus of both P. insularis and P. cantralli. This tooth is absent in representatives of other North American groups of Pirata, but is present in males of certain Palaearctic species of the genus such as P. piccolo Dahl (Holm, 1947, Fig. 9; Fuhn and Niculescu-Burlacu, 1971, Fig. 103c), P. japonicus Tanaka (Tanaka, 1974, Fig. 14), P. procurvus (Btisenberg and Strand) (Tanaka, 1974, Fig. 31; Song et al., 1978, Fig. 9D), and P. praedatoria Schenkel (Song et al., 1978, Fig. 8E). This suggests that the insularis group is a widespread component of the world genus Pirata. The purpose of this paper is to describe a new species of Pirata, the male of which also has a dorsal tooth on the median apophysis and which we therefore assign to the insularis group.