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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 37(12)

Genitalic morphology and phylogenomic placement of the Australian spider Paraplectanoides crassipes Keyserling, 1886 (Araneae, Araneidae) with a discussion on the classification of the family Araneidae

Gustavo Hormiga https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0046-1822 A * , Siddharth Kulkarni https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7400-4704 B , Miquel Arnedo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1402-4727 C , Dimitar Dimitrov https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5830-5702 D , Gonzalo Giribet https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5467-8429 E , Robert J. Kallal https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8945-5586 A and Nikolaj Scharff https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6809-2878 F *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Department of Biological Sciences, The George Washington University, 2029 G Street NW, Washington, DC 20052, USA.

B Department of Integrative Biology, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.

C Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences, and Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio), Universitat de Barcelona, Avinguda Diagonal 643, E-08028 Barcelona, Spain.

D Department of Natural History, University Museum of Bergen, University of Bergen, PO Box 7800, NO-5020 Bergen, Norway.

E Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

F Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark.

* Correspondence to: hormiga@gwu.edu, nscharff@snm.ku.dk

Handling Editor: Andy Austin

Invertebrate Systematics 37(12) 797-818 https://doi.org/10.1071/IS23050
Submitted: 16 June 2023  Accepted: 30 October 2023  Published: 29 November 2023

© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing.

Abstract

We complement and expand the existing descriptions of the Australian araneid spider Paraplectanoides crassipes Keyserling, 1886, and provide the first detailed analysis of the male palpal homologies to include examination of the expanded organ and scanning electron micrographs of the palpal sclerites. We study the placement of Paraplectanoides and the classification of the family Araneidae by combining ultraconserved elements with Sanger markers. We also added Sanger sequences of the Australian araneid genus Venomius to the molecular dataset of Scharff et al. (2020) to explore the phylogenetic placement and implications for classification of the family. We evaluate a recent proposal on the classification of the family Araneidae by Kuntner et al. (2023) in which a new family is erected for P. crassipes. Paraplectanoides is monotypic. Examination of the type material shows that Paraplectanoides kochi O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877 is misplaced in the genus and the name is a senior synonym of the araneid Isoxya penizoides Simon, 1887 (new synonymy) that results in the new combination Isoxya kochi (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877). The classification of Araneidae is revised and the following nomenclatural acts are introduced: Paraplectanoididae Kuntner, Coddington, Agnarsson and Bond, 2023 is a junior synonym of Araneidae Clerck, 1757 new synonymy; phonognathines and nephilines are subfamilies of Araneidae (Subfamily Phonognathinae Simon, 1894 rank resurrected; and Subfamily Nephilinae Simon, 1894 rank resurrected). The results of our analyses corroborate the sister group relationship between Paraplectanoides and the araneid subfamily Nephilinae. Venomius is sister to the Nephilinae + Paraplectanoides clade. The placement of the oarcine araneids and Venomius renders the family Araneidae non-monophyletic if this were to be circumscribed as in Kuntner et al. (2023). In light of the paucity of data that the latter study presents, and in absence of a robust, stable and more densely sampled phylogenetic analysis of Araneidae, the changes and definitions introduced by that classification are premature and could lead to a large number of new families for what once were araneid species if the maximum-crown-clade family definitions were to be used. Consequently, we argue for restoring the familial and subfamilial classification of Araneidae of Dimitrov et al. (2017), Scharff et al. (2020) and Kallal et al. (2020).

Keywords: Arachnida, Araneae, Australia, comparative morphology, Linnaean ranks, molecular phyogenetics, monophyly, phylogeny, taxonomy.

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