AraNet: A Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Network for Spider Species Classification

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  AraNet: A Two-Stage Convolutional Neural Network for Spider Species Classification Abstract More than 50,000 spider species have been identified worldwide, and efficient species identification is important for applications ranging from habitat monitoring to emergency medical treatment. Prior studies have shown that deep learning can be effective for spider classification on limited datasets. To extend this work, we use recent deep learning techniques that have proven effective in other domains. Our classifier, AraNet, is a two-stage convolutional neural network based on the ConvNeXt-V2 model design. AraNet sequentially combines two ConvNeXt networks: the first performs intermediate fine-tuning on a broad set of species, and the second freezes the early backbone layers and fine-tunes only the later layers for species of particular relevance. The model is trained using a large dataset comprising 1000 spider species and 548,689 images. On a 100-species classification task, AraNet ac...

A new species of Ixchela Huber (Araneae: Pholcidae) from Honduras with updated taxonomic keys, and first record of Physocyclus globosus (Taczanowski)

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A new species of Ixchela Huber (Araneae: Pholcidae) from Honduras with updated taxonomic keys, and first record of Physocyclus globosus (Taczanowski)

Abstract 

The spider genus Ixchela Huber, 2000 (family Pholcidae) is composed of 22 species distributed in North and Central America. A new species, Ixchela komari sp. nov. is described herein from the Department of Olancho, Honduras, based on adult male and female specimens, increasing the known diversity to 23 species. With this description, the diversity of the genus in Honduras increases to three known species, Ixchela furcula (F. O. Pickard-Cambridge), I. viquezi Valdez-Mondragón, and the new species described herein, making it the most diverse country in Central America for this genus to date. Additionally, Physocyclus globosus (Taczanowski) is recorded in Honduras for the first time.

Cubas-Rodríguez, A. M. & Valdez-Mondragón, A. (2026). A new species of Ixchela Huber (Araneae: Pholcidae) from Honduras with updated taxonomic keys, and first record of Physocyclus globosus (Taczanowski). Acta Zoológica Lilloana 70(2): 689-709. doi: 10.30550/j.azl/2383