Eka Arsenashvili, Natalia Bulbulashvili and Lasha-Giorgi Japaridze recently published a paper in Caucasian about the first DNA-based record of Arachnocephalus vestitus Costa, 1855 from Georgia.
The Mogoplistidae includes small and non-flying crickets with their bodies covered by the numerous squamellae, which are most diverse in tropical forests (Ingrisch 2006). The world fauna of Mogoplistidae consists of 31 extant genera. The genus Arachnocephalus contains 26 species, distributed on all continents except for North and South America (Cigliano et al. 2022). The only representative of the genus A. vestitus (Costa 1855) is known from the Iberian Peninsula and western North Africa; the Mediterranean region from southern France and Corsica, up to Romania, Crimea, the Caucasus and Asia Minor (Heller et al. 1998; Gorochov and Llorente 2001; Cigliano et al. 2022). Arachnocephalus vestitus was first observed in the Caucasus in Azerbaijan (Tarbinsky 1940) but has not been recorded from Georgia until now.
