Caucasian Spiders

Servane Laine found a beautiful female of Araneus quadratus in Svaneti (near Mestia) in September, 2008 - and took a picture of it.

Here it is …

A new article on West-Caucasian spiders appeared. The pdf is available in the download section and here:

Kovblyuk, M. M. & Ponomarev, A. V. (2008): New and interesting spiders (Aranei: Agelenidae, Corinnidae, Gnaphosidae, Nemesiidae, Thomisidae) from the West Caucasus. Caucasian Entomological Bulletin. 4 (2): 143-154 [full-text PDF]

Last year, the Georgian arachnologist Tamara Mkheidze died in Tbilisi at the age of 91. In remembrance of her, obituaries have been written in the past months. Here are the citations and a pdf of the German obituary:

• Marusik Y. M. (in press): Tamara Severyanovna Mkheidze 1915-2007. – Arthropoda Selecta 16 (3)
• Marusik Y. & S. Otto (in press): 70 years of Arachnology in Georgia: Tamara S. Mkheidze (1915-2007). Newsl. Br. arachnol. Soc.
• Otto Stefan, Vera Pkhakadze, Arnold Gegechkori (2008): 70 Jahre Arachnologie in Georgien: Tamara S. Mkheidze (1915 – 2007), Arachnologische Mitteilungen 35: 72-75. [full-text pdf (in German)]

Umit Kebapci just sent me a link to an article and a citation relating to spiders of NE Turkey (click on citation):

Bayram, A., Sancak, Z., Danisman, T., & Corak, I. (2007): Spider Fauna of the Argyropiformia Group of the North-East Blacksea Region (Superfamily: Argyropiformia, Araneae). Journal of Applied Biological Sciences. 1 (2): 13-17 [external link]

Bayram, A. & Varol, M. I. (2003): On Poecilochroa variana, recently collected in Turkey for the first time (Araneae: Gnaphosidae). Zoology in the Middle East. (30): 101-104

A former Caucasus endemic species is now known from the Crimea, too.

Kovblyuk, M. & Nadolny, A. (2007): Harpactea spasskyi (Aranei, Dysderidae) from the Crimea. Vest. Zool. 41 (6): 547-548 [full-text PDF]

The first introduction on Caucasian arachnology by Marusik et al. (2005) shed a first light on the more than 140 years old history of Caucasian arachnology, distinguishing four phases of research: (1) beginning research (1866-1938), (2) pre-Dunin (1939-1978), (3) Dunin (1979-1998) and (4) modern (1999-today). Today I provide some more information on the intensity of spider research in the Caucasus - measured in number of publications per decade.

Based on the bibliography more than 200 articles concerning Caucasian spiders have so far been published. I think I didn’t miss many. In the beginning phase of Caucasian arachnology only ten articles were published between 1866 and 1929. In the next - pre-Dunin - phase a peak can be observed between 1930 and 1949 - based mostly on the efforts of Dmitri Charitionov, Sergei Spassky and Tamara Mkheidze. Starting with a setback in publication numbers in the 1950s - and including the Dunin- and modern phase of Caucasian arachnology a steady and strong increase in research effort on Caucasian spiders can be observed.

One can also see in the graph that this trend of increasing research hardly slowed down in recent years as publication numbers still increased from 2000 to 2007. Today we live in the most productive phase of Caucasian arachnology ever - based on the sheer number of articles.

It would be most interesting to include the numbers of known Caucasian species per decade as well as the number of species described as new species from the Caucasus per decade as well. Based on such data we might be able to make some educated guesses on the number of spider species in the Caucasus. I hope to be able to do so when we finished migration to the new Ontowiki content management system in April …

I uploaded an article:

Kulczynski, L. (1895): Araneae a Dre G. Horvath in Bessarabia, Chersoneso Taurico, Transcaucasia et Armenia Russica collectae. Termesz. Füzet..   18 (1/2): 3-38. [full-text PDF 3.9 MB]

I digitalized L. Koch’s (1878) study on Caucasian spiders.

Koch, L. (1878): Kaukasische Arachnoideen. in Schneider, O. (ed): Naturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Kaukasusländer auf Grund seiner Sammelausbeute. pp. 9-71. (full-text PDF [5.9 MB])

I just noticed the species Amaurobius fenestralis (Ström, 1768) is not listed in the database although it has been recorded from Azerbaijan (Dunin, 1988, cit. in Mikhailov, 1997). Sorry, my mistake!

This will be fixed when we migrate to the new Ontowiki software tool in april. Up to then I will post all mistakes or missing entries here when I notice them. Please make a comment on this page or write me an email in case you find anything weird in the database so I can put it on my to-do-list for the new database.

A new article from M. Kovblyuk, relating to a species also distributed in the Caucasus, is now available:

Nadolny, A. A. & Kovblyuk, M. M. (2006): Carpathonesticus borutzkyi, the first record of Nesticidae from the Crimea (Aranei: Nesticidae). Arthropoda Selecta. 15 (4) : 291-294 [full-text PDF]