A taxonomic monograph of the liphistiid spider genus Heptathela, endemic to Japanese islands

Xin Xu; Hirotsugu Ono; Matjaž Kuntner; Fengxiang Liu; Daiqin Li

doi:10.3897/zookeys.888.34494

A taxonomic monograph of the liphistiid spider genus Heptathela, endemic to Japanese islands

Zookeys. 2019 Nov 11:888:1-50. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.888.34494. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Xin Xu^{1

2}, Hirotsugu Ono³, Matjaž Kuntner^{2

4

5

6}, Fengxiang Liu², Daiqin Li⁷

Affiliations

¹ College of Life Sciences, Hunan Normal University, 36 Lushan Road, Changsha 410081, Hunan Province, China Hubei University Wuhan China.
² State Key Laboratory of Biocatalysis and Enzyme Engineering, Centre for Behavioural Ecology and Evolution, School of Life Sciences, Hubei University, 368 Youyi Road, Wuhan 430062, Hubei Province, China Hunan Normal University Changsha China.
³ Department of Zoology, National Museum of Nature and Science, 4-1-1 Amakubo, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 305-0005, Japan National Museum of Nature and Science Tsukuba Japan.
⁴ Evolutionary Zoology Laboratory, Department of Organisms and Ecosystems Research, National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, Slovenia National Institute of Biology Ljubljana Slovenia.
⁵ Evolutionary Zoology Laboratory, Biological Institute ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia Evolutionary Zoology Laboratory, Biological Institute ZRC SAZU Ljubljana Slovenia.
⁶ Department of Entomology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Washington United States of America.
⁷ Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, 117543, Singapore National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore.

Abstract

Among the eight extant genera of primitively segmented spiders, family Liphistiidae, two are confined to East Asian islands, Heptathela Kishida, 1923 and Ryuthela Haupt, 1983. In this paper, a taxonomic revision of the genus Heptathela (Heptathelinae) from Kyushu and Ryukyu archipelago, Japan is provided. This study follows a multi-tier species delimitation strategy within an integrative taxonomic framework that is presented in a parallel paper, in which diagnosable lineages are considered as valid species. There, the initial hypothesis of species diversity (19) based on classical morphological diagnoses is tested with multiple species delimitation methods aimed at resolving conflict in data. This revision follows those analyses that converge on the species diversity of 20, which includes a pair of cryptic species that would have been undetected with morphology alone. After this revision, eight previously described species remain valid, two junior synonyms are proposed, and 12 new Heptathela species are described based on diagnostic evidence. To ease identification and to hint at putative evolutionary units, Heptathela is divided into three groups. The Kyushu group contains H. higoensis Haupt, 1983, H. kikuyai Ono, 1998, H. kimurai (Kishida, 1920), and H. yakushimaensis Ono, 1998; the Amami group contains H. amamiensis Haupt, 1983, H. kanenoi Ono, 1996, H. kojima sp. nov., H. sumiyo sp. nov., and H. uken sp. nov.; and the Okinawa group contains H. yanbaruensis Haupt, 1983, H. aha sp. nov., H. gayozan sp. nov., H. kubayama sp. nov., H. mae sp. nov., H. otoha sp. nov., H. shuri sp. nov., H. tokashiki sp. nov., H. unten sp. nov., and H. crypta sp. nov. Heptathela helios Tanikawa & Miyashita, 2014 is not assigned to a species group. A combination of diagnostic tools augments the morphological diagnoses that, in isolation, would be prone to error in morphologically challenging groups of organisms.

Keywords: Heptathelinae; Kyushu; Ryukyu archipelago; island endemism; species delimitation; trapdoor spiders.

Xin Xu, Hirotsugu Ono, Matjaž Kuntner, Fengxiang Liu, Daiqin Li.

Grants and funding

This study was supported in part by the grants from National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC-31601850; NSFC-31272324), the Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2017JJ3202), Singapore Ministry of Education AcRF Tier 1 grant (R-154-000-A52-114) to DL, the Japan Society of Promotion of Science (JSPS-21540487), the Slovenian Research Agency (P1-10236 and J1-6729), and the bilateral inter-governmental S&T exchange project between China and Slovenia (12-8).