Six Months of Prompt Engineering: Building Scientific Altitudinal, Topographical, and Geological Visualizations for Spiders

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  Six Months of Prompt Engineering: Building Scientific Altitudinal, Topographical, and Geological Visualizations for Spiders By: Luis A. Roque,  Arácnido Taxonomy Six months ago, I set out on what seemed like a relatively straightforward goal: create better visual representations of where spiders live. What I quickly discovered was that producing scientifically meaningful ecological visualizations requires far more than simply asking artificial intelligence to draw a landscape. It requires learning how to communicate ecology, geology, geography, climate, and biodiversity in a language that AI can understand. Over the past six months, I have spent hundreds of hours developing, testing, refining, and rewriting prompts designed to generate publication-quality altitudinal, topographical, geological, and habitat-based visualizations for spiders, particularly tarantulas and other species whose distributions are closely tied to specific environmental conditions. What began as a curi...

Three new species of Pamirosa Fomichev, Omelko & Marusik, 2024 (Araneae: Lycosidae) from Kyrgyzstan, extending the known range of Artoriinae in Central Asia

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Three new species of Pamirosa Fomichev, Omelko & Marusik, 2024 (Araneae: Lycosidae) from Kyrgyzstan, extending the known range of Artoriinae in Central Asia

Abstract

Three new Pamirosa species from Kyrgyzstan are diagnosed, described, and illustrated: P. alaica sp. nov. (male, female), P. archalturica sp. nov. (male) and P. transalaica sp. nov. (male, female). The new species represent the first records of the genus outside the type locality of the generotype, P. kudratbekovi Fomichev, Omelko & Marusik, 2024 (Pamir Mountains, Tajikistan). The new findings represent the northernmost records of Artoriinae. All new species were collected from screes at elevations of 3700–4200 m. A distribution map of all known Pamirosa species is provided. An identification key to all species is also provided. The distribution of scree-dwelling Lycosidae in Central Asia, and research prospects on this topic are discussed.

Fomichev, A.A. & Omelko, M.M. (2025) Three new species of Pamirosa Fomichev, Omelko & Marusik, 2024 (Araneae: Lycosidae) from Kyrgyzstan, extending the known range of Artoriinae in Central Asia. Zootaxa, 5618 (2), 249–266. https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5618.2.4