Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Part of Periodical (1)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Asia (1)
- DNA barcoding (1)
- Haplogynae (1)
- Israel (1)
- Mediterranean (1)
- Oceania (1)
- Palestine (1)
- Prithinae (1)
- brown recluse spiders (1)
- new species (1)
Loxosceles Heineken & Lowe, 1832 spiders are infamous for their medical importance, but a taxonomic picture of the genus is still far from complete. In this study, the Chilean species of Loxosceles are described and mapped. The males of Loxosceles surca Gertsch, 1967 and L. coquimbo Gertsch, 1967 are described for the first time. Three new species with narrow distributions are described from central and northern Chile: Loxosceles diaguita sp. nov. from the Antofagasta Region, L. pallalla sp. nov. from Coquimbo and L. vallenar sp. nov. from Atacama. The first two species are remarkable in their morphology and do not fit into any of Gertsch’s species groups, suggesting that Chile still harbours an undiscovered phylogenetic diversity of the genus. New distribution records for Loxosceles laeta (Nicolet, 1849) are provided throughout Chile.
Labahitha spiders (Arachnida: Araneae: Filistatidae) from islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean
(2022)
The genus Labahitha has hitherto comprised two species from peninsular Malaysia and Christmas Island (Australia). We here demonstrate that the genus is widespread in islands and territories across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, including the following species that have been previously assigned to other filistatid genera: Labahitha marginata (Kishida, 1936) comb. nov. (= Filistata bakeri Berland, 1938 syn. nov.), Labahitha garciai (Simon, 1892) comb. nov. (= Pritha heikkii Saaristo, 1978 syn. nov., = Pritha sechellana Benoit, 1978 syn. nov.), Labahitha nicobarensis (Tikader, 1977) comb. nov., Labahitha littoralis (Roewer, 1938) comb. nov., Labahitha insularis (Thorell, 1891) comb. nov., Labahitha sundaica (Kulczyński, 1908) comb. nov. (all transferred from Pritha, the latter three provisionally, pending re-examination of the type material); Labahitha fuscata (Nakatsudi, 1943) comb. nov. and Labahitha ryukyuensis (Ono, 2013) comb. nov. (both transferred from Tricalamus). Many of these species have been collected in synanthropic settings and from disparate islands thousands of kilometers apart. This suggests either high dispersal capabilities or, more likely, human-mediated introductions. At least L. marginata has been introduced to continental America. Two new species of Labahitha are described: Labahitha platnicki sp. nov. from New Caledonia and the Bismarck Islands and Labahitha incerta sp. nov. from Queensland, Australia. The male of Labahitha gibsonhilli (Savory, 1943) is reported for the first time. Wandella loloata sp. nov. is described from Papua New Guinea, representing the first record of this genus outside Australia. Pritha hasselti (Simon, 1906) from Indonesia is shown to be a Filistatinae, and thus the species is provisionally transferred back to Filistata.
We describe a new troglophilic species of Filistata, F. betarif sp. nov. , collected from two caves in central Israel, by using light and electron microscopy and by DNA barcoding of the cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. Sequences of this gene show more than 15% of divergence between the new species and its sibling, F. insidiatrix (Forsskål, 1775), which is widely distributed across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Notwithstanding, the two species are diagnosed only by a minor morphological detail in the embolic keel of the male pedipalp; females of both species are not diagnosable based only on morphology. We also find that samples of F. insidiatrix from different localities have large genetic divergence values (larger than 15% in some cases), but their pedipalps are identical in males; this suggests that F. insidiatrix might hide an additional cryptic diversity. We take this opportunity to provide a dichotomous key for identifying the crevice-weavers (Filistatidae) of Israel and Palestine.