Refining spider guilds for arid environments

ABSTRACT

Guilds have been used to assess how vegetation or environmental perturbations influence the community structure of animal communities. Spiders use a variety of hunting strategies. In arid environments they are the main predators of arthropods. Despite this, spider guilds have not been studied in desert ecosystems. Our study was carried out in one area of the Chihuahuan Desert. We used ramp-type traps and manual collection to capture the spiders. After identifying the specimens caught, we used a classification based on 20 and 23 traits to group the species into guilds. We used new traits for classification (eg horizontal web, triangular web, vertical web, threads coming out of the retreat). As a result, we obtained 11 guilds. Some species of the same family (e.g Gnaphosidae, Oxyopidae, Philodromidae, Theridiidae, Thomisidae) were positioned in different guilds. In addition to the classification, we provide information on the natural history of the species found. This information can be used to understand the differences between spider communities in desert vegetation types and those in other biomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Predators
• species roles
• resource use

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr Valeria Souza from the UNAM Institute of Ecology for the invitation to participate in the project ‘Total inventory of the diversity of the Churince property, Coahuila, Mexico’ from which this work emerges. The first author thanks María del Carmen Hernández Fabián, Evelyn Kristel Muzquiz Trejo, Lizeth Guadalupe Correa Cazares, Oscar Araujo and Alejandro García Ramírez for their help in the manual collection. We thank Martín Carrillo Lomas for all the logistical support provided in the field work and in our stay in the Magical Town of Cuatro Ciénegas, Coahuila; and CONACYT for maintenance grant 570591 for the development of postgraduate studies. Finally, we also thank the reviewers for their suggestions and corrections of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [570591].