20th International Congress of Arachnology

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DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE REPORTS | No. 3, July 2, 2016
retention in the natal retreat are reduced and there is
greater tolerance of immigrants.
Keywords: social evolution, intraspecific cooperation &
competition, duration of association.
Oral presentation
Instilling Arachnophilia: Spiders in Children’s
Literature
Jon Reiskind
Department of Biology, University of Florida 213 SW
41st Street, Gainesville, FL 32607, USA
Herb Levi et al. opened up the world of spiders to the
general public in North America with their informative
Spiders and Their Kin (Golden Nature Guide, 1968).
However, the time to generate a lifelong appreciation and
tolerance, if not love, of spiders is in childhood. I surveyed
a vast array of children’s non-fiction books devoted to
spiders and evaluated them using several criteria including
accuracy, quality of the illustrations, age of readers/listen-
ers, and how enjoyable and informative overall. There
are also several fictional books with prominent spider
characters. Although their spider characters are typically
anthropomorphized, the reader is often given some bio-
logically accurate information and left with a positive and/
or sympathetic view of spiders. Charlotte’s Web is a good
example. A list of books that I recommend is provided.
Keywords: arachnophobia, children’s literature
Oral presentation
Radiation of Dysderaspiders in the Canary
archipelago probably included unique evo-
lution of diet generalists from diet specialists
Milan Řezáč1, Stano Pekár 2
1Biodiversity Lab, Crop Research Institute, Prague, Czech
Republic; 2Department of Botany and Zoology, Faculty
of Sciences, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Spiders of the genus Dysdera are the only predators outside
the tropics that are woodlice specialists. They evolved
different tactics and related cheliceral modifications for
capturing their armoured prey. In the Canary Islands this
genus underwent species radiation resulting in almost fifty
species. Our objective was to determine whether all Canar-
ian Dysdera are woodlice specialists. In Tenerife and La
Gomera we collected 17 species and potential prey cohab-
iting with them and tested whether the species accepted
woodlice or alternative prey and how they captured wood-
lice. To predict the prey of the remaining Canarian species,
we performed morphometric analysis of their mouthparts.
The results indicate that only some of the Canary Dysdera
are woodlice specialists, the phylogenetically basal clades
appeared to be diet generalists. The woodlice specialists use
three capturing tactics that are identical with the tactics
present in the continental species, but two of them evolved
independently in the Canaries. The common ancestor from
North Africa was presumably a facultative woodlice special-
ist. Colonisation of newly evolved volcanic islands, where
even the niches of polyphagous invertebrates were empty,
was probably followed by dichotomous evolution–some
species further specialised on capturing woodlice while the
others became polyphagous. The dietary specialisation is
usually considered to be an evolutionary trap. The Canary
Dysdera are the first described case documenting that even
dietary specialists can return to polyphagy when the
competition for prey relaxes.
Keywords: diet specialisation, species radiation, mor-
phological adaptations, prey
Oral presentation
Cladistic analysis of Neostasina, with com-
ments on the phylogeny of Sparianthinae
(Sparassidae)
Cristina A. Rheims
Laboratório Especial de Coleções Zoológicas, Instituto
Butantan, Av. Vital Brasil, 1500, 05503-900, São
Paulo, SP, Brazil
Sparianthinae currently includes fifteen genera, namely
Decaphora Franganillo, Defectrix Petrunkevitch, Pleorotus
Simon, Pseudosparianthis Simon, Rhacocnemis Simon,
Sagellula Strand, Sampaiosia Mello-Leitão, Sparianthis
Simon, Stasina Simon, Stipax Simon, Strandiellum
20th International Congress of Arachnology