Thirty adult female individuals of each of the four orb-web spider species namely Araneus sp. (Araneidae), Gasteracantha kuhli Koch, 1837 (Araneidae), Gasteracantha hasselti Koch, 1837 (Araneidae) and Opadometa grata (Simon, 1877) (Tetragnathidae) were randomly sampled between 1000 and 1400 h from May to July 2017 in an oil palm plantation in Perak, Malaysia. Morphological and web characters of these orb-web spiders were obtained and analyzed using principal component analysis (PCA) and bootstrapping methods. For the morphological characters, the PCA results captured a total of 99% of the variance and indicate that the Araneid species have distinct clustering. For the web characters, the PCA captured 76% of the total variance and did not show any distinct clustering with significant overlapping between them. Moreover, the mean and 95% confidence intervals using bootstrapping identified significant differences in the morphological and web characters for most spider species with little overlap. This study indicates that the four orb-web spider species could coexist in terms of their spatial territory and food resources in the oil palm plantation, suggesting that these resources were not a limiting factor.
A new species of the twig-legged orb-weaver spider from the genus Cyphalonotus Simon 1895, C. selangor sp. nov., is illustrated and described based on a female specimen from Kuala Selangor Nature Park, Malaysia.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.