New Praying Mantis Species Discovered in Iran’s Zagros Oak Forests

Deep in the oak forests of Lorestan Province, western Iran, a ground-dwelling predator has been hiding in plain sight. Researchers surveying the forest floor of the Zagros Mountains have collected a praying mantis that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a species entirely new to science. The insect has been named Rivetina archibaldi, and its description in the Journal of Orthoptera Research adds a remarkable new entry to the mantid fauna of one of the world’s most biologically complex borderlands. The find is more than a taxonomic formality: it is a reminder that even in a country as large and well-traveled as Iran, the eighteenth-largest nation on Earth, the smallest residents of remote ecosystems can still elude detection.

The genus Rivetina belongs to the family Rivetinidae, a group of predominantly ground-dwelling mantids distributed across the Mediterranean Basin and Western and Central Asia. More than 30 species of Rivetina are known, stretching from the Iberian Peninsula and northwestern Africa through the Middle East and into Pakistan and Tajikistan. The Middle East and Central Asia are regarded as major centers of diversity for the genus, yet most of its species are morphologically similar, uniformly colored, and easily confused. Species of Rivetina are adapted to xerothermic environments: they are never green, they run rapidly across the ground, they shelter beneath stones, and the females lay their eggs directly in the soil, a feat made possible by a pair of spines on the seventh abdominal sternite.

Before this discovery, literature recorded eight Rivetina species and subspecies from Iran, including R. caucasica caucasica, R. dolichoptera, R. excellens, R. inermis inermis, R. inermis iranica, R. rhombicollis, and R. syriaca syriaca, along with R. baetica baetica, whose presence in the country is considered doubtful given how far its confirmed range lies from Iran. Fieldwork in Lorestan Province changed that picture. The team collected juvenile specimens from the ground beneath oak trees, reared them under laboratory conditions until adulthood, and then subjected the resulting adults to rigorous morphological scrutiny, comparing them against published descriptions, verified images of type specimens, and their own reference material from Iran, Yemen, and Palestine.

The verdict was unambiguous. The Lorestan mantises fit the genus Rivetina but exhibited features that set them apart from every Middle Eastern congener. The single most decisive character turned out to be surprisingly subtle: the minimum width of the metazone, the rear portion of the pronotum, the elongated thoracic shield characteristic of mantises. In the new species, this measurement averages just 1.78 millimeters, the smallest value recorded among all examined species of the genus. Every other Iranian and Iraqi Rivetina, from the slender-pronotumed R. dolichoptera with its ratio of 3.93 to the broad-bodied R. rhombicollis at 2.51, falls clearly outside that narrow profile.

Male genitalia provided the definitive confirmation. In mantis taxonomy, the sclerotized phallic complex is often the ultimate arbiter of species boundaries, and here too the new species showed a distinctive signature, including a relatively oval ventral phallomere with a rounded median secondary distal process and a thin, acute posterior lobe of the phalloid apophysis. Compared with its closest look-alike, R. dolichoptera, the new species differs in the shape of the pronotum, the shorter supra-anal plate, and these genital details. The authors also distilled their findings into a dichotomous key to the male Rivetina of Iran, the first consolidated tool of its kind for the national species complex, allowing future researchers to separate the species using pronotal proportions, wing length, and supra-anal plate shape.

The formal description is anchored by a holotype male collected on 3 June 2016 at Pol-Dokhtar in an oak forest at an elevation of 1,128 meters, together with paratype series deposited in the National Museum of Natural History and Genetic Resources in Tehran and in a private collection. The measurements accompanying the description are exhaustive: males average about 55.5 millimeters in body length with wings that fail to reach the abdominal tip, while females, at roughly 56.4 millimeters, are more robust, darker greyish brown, and brachypterous, with wings barely longer than the pronotum. High-resolution habitus photography, captured with a Nikon D850 and macro lens, documents both sexes and the intricate genital structures for future comparison.

The species name itself carries a conservation message. Archibaldi honors Dr. George Archibald, the renowned conservationist who has spent more than half a century protecting cranes worldwide, playing a central role in saving several crane species from extinction and promoting their conservation across continents, including the Middle East and Iran. Naming a newly discovered forest predator after a champion of threatened birds links the fate of Iran’s invertebrate heritage to the broader global story of biodiversity protection, and it underscores how much of that heritage remains undocumented even within a single mountain range.

The living insect is as striking as its taxonomy. In life, each abdominal tergite displays a pale base and dark apex, crossed by a pair of whitish paramedian markings, and the compound eyes bear two pale horizontal stripes that fade in preserved specimens. Juveniles respond to threats with a deimatic display, extending their forelegs in a manner reminiscent of their relatives in the genus Bolivaria. Adults escalate further: raising the body, exposing the spiny forelegs, spreading the wings, opening the maxillae, and curling the abdomen upward. Most intriguingly, adults of both sexes, and especially males, engage in rhythmic stamping, pumping their midlegs and hindlegs up and down during encounters, a behavior whose function remains unexplored.

The eye patterns observed in live specimens may prove taxonomically valuable in their own right. The new species and R. excellens share similar incomplete horizontal lines on the eyes, while R. rhombicollis shows vertical markings, and in Bolivaria brachyptera and B. moseri a dark line runs across the eyes and lower frons. Because these patterns are usually lost in preserved material, they have been largely overlooked, but the authors suggest their interspecific variation could aid species recognition and enrich future phylogenetic analyses of the family.

Beyond the species itself, the discovery speaks to a wider research gap. The regions along Iran’s western and southern peripheries, close to the borders of several Arab nations, have long been neglected by taxonomic research, and the finding of R. archibaldi in the forest floor habitat of the Zagros highlights the exceptional ecological value of these ancient mountain forests. Those same forests face mounting pressures from traditional livestock grazing, recurrent wildfires, prolonged droughts, and unsustainable wood extraction, even as they support a remarkable array of vertebrates and invertebrates. The authors argue that only community-based conservation, grounded in local stewardship and participatory governance, can ultimately safeguard the Zagros and its fauna. They also note that the genus Rivetina as a whole is overdue for a comprehensive revision integrating molecular and detailed morphological data across its range, work that would likely clarify species boundaries and phylogenetic relationships. For now, one narrow-pronotumed predator of the Zagros oak litter stands as evidence of what patient fieldwork can still reveal.

Subject of Research: Description of a new praying mantis species, Rivetina archibaldi, from the Zagros oak forests of western Iran

Article Title: Rivetina archibaldi sp. nov. ( Mantodea , Rivetinidae ), a new praying mantis from the Zagros oak forests of Iran

Article References: Kolnegari, M., Handal, E., & Zare Khormizi, M. (2026). Rivetina archibaldi sp. nov. (Mantodea, Rivetinidae), a new praying mantis from the Zagros oak forests of Iran. Journal of Orthoptera Research, 35(2), 283-292. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.35.174839

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.35.174839

Keywords: praying mantis, Rivetina, Zagros Mountains, Iran, taxonomy, new species, Mantodea, Rivetinidae, oak forests, Lorestan Province, entomology, biodiversity