20th International Congress of Arachnology

of these characters across the two schizomid families.

The analyses were based on 44 morphological characters

and 22 schizomid species, and two thelyphonid species as

outgroup. Parsimony, Bayesian inference analyses, and

ancestral state reconstruction of the “annuli” characters

were conducted. The resulting topology confirmed the

monophyly of Hubbardiidae further divided into Hubbar-

diinae + Megaschizominae. However, Protoschizomidae was

not recovered monophyletic. The ancestral state reconstruc-

tion of the number of annuli in the common ancestor of

Schizomida suggested gain and loss of the different annuli

at different hierarchical levels. Finally, the flagellum con-

tains good taxonomic characters, but caution needs to be

taken when used to diagnose genera, since the relative posi-

tion of the setae presents a lot of variation.

Keywords: Schizomida, phylogenetics, Bayesian, parsi-

mony, flagellum

Oral presentation

Are male copulatory structures in the

order Scorpiones informative at suprage-

neric levels?

Lionel Monod

1,2

, Caitlin M. Baker

, Lucie Cauwet

, Julia G.

Cosgrove

, Gonzalo Giribet

, Edmundo Gonzalez-Santillán

Siegfried Huber

, Carlos Santibañez

, Prashant Sharma

Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Route de Malagnou 1,

1205 Genève, Switzerland;

Département de Génétique

& Evolution, Sciences III, Université de Genève, Genève,

Switzerland;

Harvard University, Department of Organ-

ismic and Evolutionary Biology, Museum of Comparative

Zoology, Cambridge, USA;

Laboratorio Nacional de

Genómica para la Biodiversidad, Centro de Investigación

y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politecnico

Nacional, Irapuato, Guanajuato, México;

Uhldingen-

Mühlhofen, Germany;

Departamento de Medicina

Molecular y Bioprocesos, Instituto de Biotecnología,

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México;

University

of Wisconsin, Department of Zoology, Madison, USA

lionel.monod@ville-ge.ch

The male sexual apparatus is widely used in arthropod

taxonomy to diagnose species. In many organisms,

however, it is considered to have evolved too rapidly to be

phylogenetically informative above the generic level. In

scorpions, the male reproductive organs produce a pair

of partly sclerotized structures, the hemispermatophores,

that are eventually assembled when they exit the body to

form a spermatophore. Surprisingly, in many genera of

scorpions the hemispermatophores lack the interspecific

morphological diversity observed in copulatory organs

of other arthropods, suggesting that these structures

may actually provide a stronger phylogenetic signal for

suprageneric ranks than previously thought. A thorough

reassessment of the morphology of hemispermatophores

and spermatophores pre- and post-insemination across

the whole order, as well as of the mechanisms of insemi-

nation, allows to recognize a complex of slowly evolving

characters from which a series of basic bauplans are

defined. In parallel, a phylogenomic tree was inferred with

an emphasis on non-bothriurid Scorpionoidea, which

comprises taxa with the most complicated hemisper-

matophores. The taxon sampling for this group covers

all the families except one and about 65% of all genera.

Ancestral states of the hemispermatophore bauplans were

reconstructed on this new phylogeny, and compared with

ancestral reconstructions on trees based on morphologi-

cal data published earlier. A putative evolutive sequence

is presented and the value of male copulatory structures

in scorpion phylogenetics is discussed with regard to the

reliability of the different phylogenies.

Keywords: hemispermatophore, spermatophore,

bauplan, phylogenomic

Poster presentation

Nanoscale fibrillar attachment devices

for the dry adhesion in the salticid spider

Plexippus setipes

Myung-Jin Moon, Hoon Kim, Jae-Hwi Seo, Kyo-Jin Kim

Department of Biological Sciences, Dankook Univer-

sity, Cheonan 330-714, Korea

moonmj@dankook.ac.kr

The cuticles of the salticid spiders have the distinctive

attachment apparatuses for adhesion on smooth dry

surface without sticky fluids. It has been reported that the

van der Waals interaction plays a dominant role of the dry

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DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE

REPORTS

No. 3, July 2, 2016

Cushing