An Overlooked Species of Enigmatic Wolf Spider (Araneae: Lycosidae) Clarifies the Mysterious Distribution of its Sibling

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  An Overlooked Species of Enigmatic Wolf Spider (Araneae: Lycosidae) Clarifies the Mysterious Distribution of its Sibling Abstract Several wolf spiders exhibit a peculiar geographical distribution. One good example of this is Pardosa aenigmatica Tongiorgi, 1966, recently recognized in Italy and the Middle East but missing in the Balkans. A comparison of populations from the disjunctive areas revealed that they would be better described as two distinct species. As a result, here we describe Pardosa sepidehae sp. nov. The paper includes detailed descriptions and comparative illustrations of male and female copulatory organs for the newly discovered species and P. aenigmatica. Pardosa sepidehae sp. nov. is distributed in the Middle East, whereas P. aenigmatica remains endemic to the Apennine Peninsula. Adile Akpinar, Petr Dolejš "An Overlooked Species of Enigmatic Wolf Spider (Araneae: Lycosidae) Clarifies the Mysterious Distribution of its Sibling," Annales Zoologici, 76(29), ...

Advances in the reconstruction of the spider tree of life: A roadmap for spider systematics and comparative studies

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Advances in the reconstruction of the spider tree of life: A roadmap for spider systematics and comparative studies


Abstract

In the last decade and a half, advances in genetic sequencing technologies have revolutionized systematics, transforming the field from studying morphological characters or a few genetic markers, to genomic datasets in the phylogenomic era. A plethora of molecular phylogenetic studies on many taxonomic groups have come about, converging on, or refuting prevailing morphology or legacy-marker-based hypotheses about evolutionary affinities. Spider systematics has been no exception to this transformation and the inter-relationships of several groups have now been studied using genomic data. About 51 500 extant spider species have been described, all with a conservative body plan, but innumerable morphological and behavioural peculiarities. Inferring the spider tree of life using morphological data has been a challenging task. Molecular data have corroborated many hypotheses of higher-level relationships, but also resulted in new groups that refute previous hypotheses. In this review, we discuss recent advances in the reconstruction of the spider tree of life and highlight areas where additional effort is needed with potential solutions. We base this review on the most comprehensive spider phylogeny to date, representing 131 of the 132 spider families. To achieve this sampling, we combined six Sanger-based markers with newly generated and publicly available genome-scale datasets. We find that some inferred relationships between major lineages of spiders (such as Austrochiloidea, Palpimanoidea and Synspermiata) are robust across different classes of data. However, several new hypotheses have emerged with different classes of molecular data. We identify and discuss the robust and controversial hypotheses and compile this blueprint to design future studies targeting systematic revisions of these problematic groups. We offer an evolutionary framework to explore comparative questions such as evolution of venoms, silk, webs, morphological traits and reproductive strategies.

Kulkarni, S., Wood, H.M. and Hormiga, G. (2023), Advances in the reconstruction of the spider tree of life: A roadmap for spider systematics and comparative studies. Cladistics. https://doi.org/10.1111/cla.12557