Southeast Asian pholcid spiders

Description

Pholcid spiders are among the most diverse spider families but their mainly tropical distribution and lack of specialists have long hampered knowledge about the group. A concentrated effort over the last 15 years has dramatically improved the situation but Southeast Asian taxa remain a major gap of knowledge. The present project aims at closing this gap and focuses, apart from the taxonomy, on three major questions: (1) how do Southeast Asian taxa fit into the phylogeny of Pholcidae? (2) Are patterns of diversity and distribution comparable to those in New World and African regions? (3) Is there evidence for a causal relationship between evolutionary shifts among microhabitats and species diversity (adaptive speciation)?

Location