Mantodea of Iran: A review-based study

Scattered taxonomic data can be used to determine the geographic distribution of arthropods such as Mantodea (mantids). The distribution of mantids is not well known in Iran and not readily determined because the literature has been published in a mix of Persian-language and non-Persian-language scientific references, including books, journals, annual congress proceedings, and final reports of academic projects. To create a national checklist of mantids in Iran, I reviewed 35 Persian and non-Persian (English, German, and Italian) publications. I recorded 57 praying mantid species from 9 families described from localities across Iran. I identified 18 spe-cies— Ameles decolor , Ameles heldreichi , Ameles picteti , Ameles spallanzania , Elaea marchali , Empusa pennata , Eremiaphila andresi , Eremiaphila cerisy , Eremiaphila turcica , Geomantis larvoides , Iris coeca , Iris pitcheri , Oxyothespis wagneri , Pareuthy-phlebs palmonii , Pseudoyersinia paui , Rivetina baetica , Severinia nigrofasciata , and Severinia turcomaniae —with records in Iran that may be incorrect based on geographic ranges that do not include Iran and similarity to other species that do occur in Iran. In the proposed checklist comprising 39 species, the family Rivetinidae, with 9 species, and the 2 families Amorphoscelidae and Na-nomantidae, with 1 species each, comprised the greatest and least diversity, respectively. This checklist can facilitate future studies on Iran’s mantodeans.


Introduction
Ancient records indicate that mantids have long been a part of human culture (Evans 2004), including humans in the Persian Plateau of Iran where mantids are depicted in ancient rock art (Kolnegari et al. 2020) and used in traditional medicine (Kolnegari pers.obs.).At 1,648,195 km 2 , Iran is currently the 18 th largest country and is located in the Middle East region of southwestern Asia.Iran is bordered to the north by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea; to the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan; to the south by the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf; and to the west by Iraq and Turkey.About one-third of its 7,680km boundary is seacoast (Davoudzadeh 1997).
Iran includes three climatic zones: Mediterranean to the south, arid West Asian to the east and west, and temperate humid/semi-humid Caspian zone to the north (Esmaeili et al. 2017).Several major biogeographical regions meet in this country, including the Palearctic, Eremic, and Oriental, which support a broad range of arthropod diversity (Zohary 1973, Olson et al. 2001).This includes a diversity of praying mantids that has been largely overlooked by native entomologists focused on species more important to agriculture (Kolnegari 2022).
Recently, mantid research in Iran has led to significant findings, including the identification of a new species (i.e., Holaptilon brevipugilis Kolnegari, 2018).This discovery highlights the potential for new discoveries resulting from more thorough taxonomic surveys in Iran.In anticipation of future taxonomic surveys, I undertook a literature review of Mantodea in Iran.Herein, I report the results, and in so doing, I provide the first checklist of the mantids of Iran.

Material and method
I reviewed the database of a national organization, the Iranian Research Institute of Plant Protection (IRIPP), which is regarded as the most important scientific organization working on arthropods in the country.The IRIPP's database consists of books, research articles, and annual congresses proceedings archived since 1946 (IRIPP 2022).I also reviewed two comprehensive books entitled Mantodea -Gottesanbeterinnen der Welt (Ehrmann 2002) and Praying Mantids; From Cognition to Conservation (Kolnegari 2022).Moreover, I used Google to search for the keywords "Mantodea", "mantis", "Iran", and "Persia" in English and Persian.I used these sources to create a national checklist of mantids in Iran.I adjusted the list to reflect current nomenclature and classification as indicated in the Mantodea Species File (Schwarz andRoy 2019, Otte et al. 2023) and in the latest relevant publications (Shcherbakov andSavitsky 2015, Villani 2020).In implementing these adjustments, I consolidated temporal and cross-language synonyms.I also documented records describing species that, if present in Iran, would be geographically highly isolated from their recognized ranges, and I identified these records as doubtful.

Checklist of mantids of Iran
The checklist is presented following alphabetic order.The list of references referring to a species are presented under backets after the species name.Iranian repository.-?

Discussion
This study demonstrates the potential significance of Iranian repositories for future investigations.However, to validate the primary identification of Iranian repositories, the specimens need to be properly preserved.Unfortunately, some have been poorly preserved in local institutions where they are prone to accidental destruction or loss (Kolnegari pers. obs.).The Hayk Mirzayans Insect Museum (HMIM) has solved these problems by limiting access to voucher specimens.This ensures conservation of the largest insect collection of Iran with over four million specimens (IRIPP 2022) but simultaneously creates a challenge to documenting the history and distribution of mantids in Iran.At least 35 mantid specimens likely housed in the HMIM should be included in future study of the Mantodea of Iran.
Although the number of mantids documented in Iran is relatively small to date (i.e., approximately 2% of globally identified mantids), the large size of the country and the relative paucity of information on its invertebrate community make it likely that Iran contains undocumented mantid taxa.This is particularly true of the western half of Iran where two main mountain ranges (Alborz and Zagros) have been described as cradles of unique floristic and faunistic diversity (Zohary 1973, Esmaeili et al. 2017).Systematic surveys appear to have never occurred in four provinces in western Iran, including Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Qazvin, and Zanjan (Fig. 1).Moreover, each of the 17 known ecoregions of Iran-particularly marginal ecoregions-could be highly important from a zoogeographical perspective (Olson et al. 2001), but they were not considered in previous studies.Therefore, conducting systematic surveys in mantid habitats in the unexplored provinces and in all ecoregions of Iran could lead to taxonomically and faunistically significant achievements.

Table 1 .
Literature used in the review-based study of Iran's Mantodea.

Table 2 .
Iran's Mantodea families and number of their species in the country.