Relationships among Prithinae spiders from Indo-Pacific islands (Araneae: Filistatidae)

IVAN LUIZ FIORINI DE MAGALHÃES; MARTÍN JAVIER RAMÍREZ

Buenos Aires

Congreso; The XXXV Annual Meeting of the Willi Hennig Society; 2016

With ca. 120 described species and a rather conserved morphology across its members, Filistatidae is not one of the most diverse spider families, but has a worldwide distribution. One of its genera, Pritha, was proposed in 1967 to contain those species with males having a horseshoe-shaped cymbium in their genitalia. In its original concept, Pritha was widely distributed from the Mediterranean region to Asia, Australia and some Pacific Islands. Subsequently, other genera were erected for some of its species, such as Tricalamus (from central and eastern Asia) and Wandella (from Australia). However, these changes might have rendered Pritha a non-monophyletic assemblage. We have assessed the phylogenetic relationships among species of Pritha based on morphological (47 characters) and molecular (COI, ~500 bp) evidence, focusing on species from islands in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Our results indicate that some species of Pritha and Tricalamus from these regions, namely those in the P. bakeri and P. garciai groups, are more closely related to Wandella than to the generotype Pritha nana. Thus, we propose that Pritha should be circumscribed to contain only species from the Mediterranean region, with transferral of Indo-Pacific species to Wandella. Additionally, we find that several species have wide distributions, such as ?Pritha? garciai (Seychelles, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines), ?Pritha? cf. bakeri (Taiwan, New Guinea, Samoa, Kiribati, Central America) and ?Tricalamus? fuscatus (Brunei, Japan, Palau, New Caledonia). Whether these interesting distributions result from vicariance, natural transoceanic dispersal, or accidental human introduction will have to wait for further data on the genus.