''Taito'' is a genus of harvestmen in the family

Cosmetidae Cosmetidae is a family of harvestmen in the suborder Laniatores. With over 700 species, it is one of the largest families in Opiliones. They are distributed from Argentina to the southern USA with the highest diversity in northern South America, ...

. The genus is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to the

Amazon Basin The Amazon basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. The Amazon drainage basin covers an area of about , or about 35.5 percent of the South American continent. It is located in the countries of Bolivi ...

in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Taxonomy

The genus is named for the Japanese video game company

Taito is a Japanese company that specializes in video games, toys, arcade cabinets and game centers, based in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The company was founded by Michael Kogan in 1953 as the importing vodka, vending machines and jukeboxes into Japan. It b ...

because the colorful body marks of the species in this genus resemble the aliens from their '' Space Invaders'' video game. The

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen ...

of the genus, '' Taito spaceinvaders'', is named for the game as well. Another species is named for the similar 1981 game, '' Galaga''. Some species in this genus were formerly placed in '' Cynortula'', '' Eucynortella'', and ''

Cynorta ''Cynorta'' is a genus from the subfamily Cosmetinae. The Genus was first described by Carl Ludwig Koch.Cynorta Koch, 1839 in GBIF Secretariat (2019). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org ...

''; however, the general taxonomy of Cosmetidae is poorly known and so most genera are

monotypic genera In biology, a monotypic taxon is a taxonomic group (taxon) that contains only one immediately subordinate taxon. A monotypic species is one that does not include subspecies or smaller, infraspecific taxa. In the case of genera, the term "unispec ...

or wastebin taxa. These species were moved to ''Taito'' largely based on morphological evidence.

Species

There are currently 15 described species in ''Taito'':

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q105320572 Cosmetidae Harvestman genera