Marronoid Spider Systematics

Spiders are an incredibly diverse group of organisms that play an essential role in ecosystems all over the world. In spite of their notoriety and the fear that they often inspire, huge gaps in our knowledge remain for some groups of spiders. Relationships among spider families that lack support through other lines of evidence (e.g., morphology) have recently been uncovered through molecular phylogenetics. One such group is the “marronoid” clade, which contains about 3,400 described species in nine families. Marronoids run the gamut of life history strategies, with social species, species producing a variety of silk types, and species occurring in a range of extreme environments. Despite recognition of the ecological variability in the group, there remains uncertainty about family-level relationships, and the lack of an evolutionary framework, in turn leaves those diverse ecologies without an evolutionary context. This project aims to resolve the evolutionary relationships among this group of spiders and their relative position within the spider tree of life, shining a light on one of the most poorly known parts of the spider tree of life. Additionally, a main goal of this project is to train the next generation of spider taxonomists, organismal biologists and systematists in the US.

Funding: NSF DEB-2026623 to Crews, Esposito, and Spagna. ARTS: Taxonomy and Molecular Systematics of Mesh Web Spiders (Araneae: Dictynidae).