Testing the monophyly of the ground-dweller spider genus Harpactea Bristowe, 1939 (Araneae, Dysderidae) with the description of three new species

Abstract

The genus Harpactea Bristowe, 1939 (Araneae, Dysderidae) is one of the most diverse and abundant components of the Mediterranean ground-dwelling spider fauna. However, the taxonomic boundaries of the genus are unclear and its monophyly has been questioned, yet never tested, in a quantitative framework. The only taxonomic revisions in the genus trace back to the 1960s–1990s, and most subsequent work has consisted of single species descriptions. Part of the confusion surrounding the genus and species groups delimitations have to do with the lack of a standardized nomenclature for diagnostic structures based on explicit homology statements. Here we use the description of new species of Harpactea to propose a set of homologies in the male and female genitalia and a standardized nomenclature for those structures. We formally describe three new Harpactea species: H. salvatorei sp. nov., from a cave in the north-eastern Italian Alps, and H. damini sp. nov. and H. mateparlovi sp. nov. from different caves on the Biokovo Mountain and surroundings in Croatia. All the new taxa belong to the lepida species group. In addition, we use a multilocus target gene approach to provide the first hypothesis on the internal phylogenetic structure of the genus Harpactea and the subfamily Harpacteinae, which includes representatives of all currently accepted species groups in the genus and genera in the subfamily. Our results support the close affinities of the species here described but reject the monophyly of both Harpactea and some of the species groups proposed in the literature.

http://zoobank.org/NomenclaturalActs/bd2739c9-c1f0-451f-88cc-06c784987a62

http://zoobank.org/NomenclaturalActs/ffb50b2e-ac7b-49a8-aa0d-408143c8a990

http://zoobank.org/NomenclaturalActs/184c58fe-6501-4cc2-ba50-cca4fcff8289

Key words:

• Alps
• caves
• Dinarides
• genitalic homologies
• phylogeny
• Sanger sequencing
• taxonomy

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Giuliano Trezzi, Christa Deeleman-Reinhold, Peter Hlaváč, Jan Lakota, David Čeplik, and all members of CBSS who collected the spider material, to Fulvio Gasparo, who loaned us the samples of H. grisea and H. tergestina used for the comparison, to Adrià Bellvert and Luis Crespo of the Arnedo Lab group, for the help with the microscopes and vulva preparation, to Humbert Salvadó for granting access to the optical microscope and to Giorgio Fornasier for providing the bibliography of the Italian cave. Thanks to Tin Rožman for help in adjusting photos and figures. We are most grateful to Stefano Mammola (Verbania, Italy), Robert (Bob) J. Kallal (Washington DC, USA) and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/14772000.2020.1776786.

Associate Editor: Rosa Fernandez

Additional information

Funding

The work was financially supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (749867) (MP), Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (http://agaur.gencat.cat/en/inici/), and by CGL2016-80651-P from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (MA) and 2017SGR83 from the Catalan Government (MA).