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...

On the synonymization of Lipocrea and Lariniaria with Larinia (Araneae: Araneidae) using molecular systematics

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By Akio Tanikawa - http://spider.fun.cx/okinawa/List.htm, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3513715

On the synonymization of Lipocrea and Lariniaria with Larinia (Araneae: Araneidae) using molecular systematics

Abstract
Molecular phylogenetic analyses, Bayesian inference and Maximum Likelihood, were conducted using datasets of five genes to assess the validity of the genera Lipocrea Thorell 1878 and Lariniaria Grasshoff 1970. While the genus Larinia Simon 1874 sensu lato was initially suspected to be polyphyletic, the results showed that the target species of this study, including the ones of Lipocrea and Lariniaria, formed a monophyletic group. Thus, both genera should be considered junior synonyms of Larinia as a separation from the latter is unnecessary. Nonetheless, the analysis reaffirmed concerns regarding the potential polyphyly of Larinia sensu lato and indicated the need for further investigation. 
Akio Tanikawa, Thanakron Into, Booppa Petcharad, On the synonymization of Lipocrea and Lariniaria with Larinia (Araneae: Araneidae) using molecular systematics, Acta Arachnologica, 2025, Volume 74, Issue 2, Pages 85-89, Released on J-STAGE December 11, 2025, Online ISSN 1880-7852, Print ISSN 0001-5202, https://doi.org/10.2476/asjaa.74.85, https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/asjaa/74/2/74_85/_article/-char/en