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...

Four species of Zoica Simon, 1898 from Asia (Araneae, Lycosidae)

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Four species of Zoica Simon, 1898 from Asia (Araneae, Lycosidae)

Abstract

Three new species of the wolf spider genus Zoica Simon, 1898 are described from eastern and southeastern parts of Asia: Zoica dulong Lu, Zhang & Wang, sp. nov. (Yunnan, ♂♀) and Z. medogensis Lu, Zhang & Wang, sp. nov. (Xizang, ♂♀) from China and Z. thailandica Lu, Zhang & Wang, sp. nov. (Ratchaburi, ♂♀) from Thailand. The male of Z. oculata Buchar, 1997 (Xizang) is described here for the first time, and the first record of the species from China is reported. Descriptions and photographs of all the species are provided.

Lu J-Z, Marusik YM, Zhang Z-S, Wang L-Y (2025) Four species of Zoica Simon, 1898 from Asia (Araneae, Lycosidae). ZooKeys 1249: 371-385. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1249.152933