“Another spider paper?!” you might ask. “More new spiders, what’s so interesting?” Well in addition to a revised genus and three new species, Adrià Bellvert and Miquel Arnedo’s most recent publication highlights some of the unique challenges taxonomists deal with as they work to untangle species relationships. “I think that the important part [of this paper] is it interfaces very well, it summarizes very well the kind of problems that.. we have to address when we are trying to understand the diversity of mega diverse groups,” says Miquel. Things like deteriorated specimens, missing label information, and difficulty collecting also contribute. But by the end of their story we see that time, effort, and collaboration can bring about some really important findings.

Miquel and Adrià’s paper “Integrating museum collections and molecules reveals genus-level synonymy and new species in red devil spiders (Araneae, Dysderidae) from the Middle East and Central Asia” is in volume 921 of the Journal of European Taxonomy

It can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2024.921.2429

A transcript of this episode can be found here: Adrià Bellvert and Miquel Arnedo - Transcript

New Species: Dysdera jaegeri, Dysdera naouelae, and Dysdera kourosh

Episode image credit: Adrià Bellvert

You can follow Adrià and Miquel on Twitter: @AdriaBellvert and @spidersysevo (Miquel’s lab)

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Music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom)

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