Morphology of spiders and phylogenetic analyses: New opportunities and directions

MARTÍN J. RAMÍREZ

São Pedro, SP Brasil

Simposio; XVII International Congress of Arachnology; 2007

International Society of Arachnology

Spider systematics has devoted good attention to morphology.  Over the last 30 years, the quantitative cladistic analyses have accumulated character hypotheses spanning most of the character systems, including behavior and web architecture.  The encyclopedic, muscular analyses covering a wide range of character systems over broad taxonomic diversity are arising as a rich source of discoveries and documentation of morphological diversity.  However, as characters hypotheses and observational data multiplies, it is becoming harder and harder for a single scientist to keep pace with scholarly, completeness, and documentation of observations.  Paper publications have proved limited in the transmission of knowledge supporting phylogenetic analyses.  Public, electronically accessible repositories of data (on specimens, images, observations, or homology hypotheses), offer new opportunities to overcome restrictions in publication, archival, and maintenance of data.  But more importantly, the new technologies open the field to a new schema of distributed production and accumulation of morphology data.  These ideas are already changing the way we collect data and conceive characters.