Picking pearls from the Silk Road: Insights into the spider (Arachnida, Araneae) diversity in Georgia from the Caucasus Barcode of Life (CaBOL) project. Part III

Abstract

The present study contains information about a small number of spiders collected between 2018 and 2023. The spiders were determined to species level and partially assisted by genetic barcoding of the COI gene. Among the resulting 33 species, 23 species and three genera, are recorded from Georgia for the first time, of which 11 are new records for the entire Caucasus. Of the 26 barcoded specimens representing 18 species, six species (Agroeca maculata L. Koch, 1879; Aituaria eriashvilii (Marusik, 1987); Evippa sjostedti Schenkel, 1936; Lathys cf. lehtineni Kovblyuk, Kastrygina & Omelko, 2014; Zelotes segrex (Simon, 1878); Lathys lehtineni Kovblyuk, Kastrygina & Omelko, 2014; Maculoncus obscurus Tanasevitch, Ponomarev & Chumachenko, 2016) are barcoded for the first time. In addition, 12 new regional records for 10 species are provided. The collecting information for each record is provided in detail, together with a discussion of the barcoding results and remarks, supported by 48 diagnostic drawings of 22 first-recorded species. A potential synonymy of Pelecopsis odontophora (Kulczyński, 1895) with P. parallela (Wider, 1834) and Bassaniodes loeffleri (Roewer, 1955) with B. pseudorectilineus (Wunderlich, 1995) is discussed.