We study the morphology, phylogenetic placement and classification of the rare Australian spider Paraplectanoides crassipes Keyserling, 1886. We complement and expand the description of this araneid species and provide the first detailed study of the male palpal homologies using scanning electron micrographs. Our phylogenetic analyses corroborate the sister group relationship between Paraplectanoides and the araneid subfamily Nephilinae. We evaluate a recent proposal for the classification, and restore the familial and subfamilial classification of Araneidae to that present in our recent works that have been based on more extensive analyses and that will result in a more stable classification of Araneidae spiders. (Photograph by Gustavo Hormiga.)

Freshwater leeches of the genus Torix Blanchard, 1893 in Japan have considerable morphological variation, leading to taxonomic confusion. In this study, we revisit the taxonomic accounts of T. orientalis (Oka, 1925) and T. tagoi (Oka, 1925) to clarify the diagnostic characteristics for the three Torix species in Japan. Our morphological and molecular phylogenetic analyses demonstrated that the Japanese Torix species are indistinguishable. We therefore conclude that the three Torix species should be synonymised and treated as a single species. (Image credit: Chiaki Kambayashi.)