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Student 10-Minute Presentation Competition

Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity

Student Competition

Student

Grad 10-min Competition: SysEB, Taxonomy

Spiders of the spiny forest - fifteen new species and seven new genera of Dictynidae O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1871 (Araneae: Dictynoidea) from Madagascar and southeastern Africa

Monday, November 10, 2025
12:06 PM - 12:18 PM Pacific
Location: Oregon Convention Center, B115, OCC
Oral Presentation Student Competition
The mesh-web weaver family Dictynidae is grouped within an extensive complex of families that make up the marronoid clade (Wheeler et al, 2017). One major challenge for this group’s taxonomy has been the overrepresentation of species documented from the Holarctic, and the underrepresentation of documentation from the Afrotropical region and Australia. Here, for the first time, we explore the diversity of dictynids from Madagascar, as well as some from Southeastern Africa, in hopes of leveraging the island’s magnificent biodiversity and propensity for endemism to test our emerging framework of dictynid phylogeny. We used a combined UCE and Sanger molecular phylogeny alongside morphology to fit the new taxa into the larger dictynid phylogeny proposed by Montana et al. (2025) and create a species-level key to all known Madagascan taxa.