Huttonia palpimanoides
| Huttonia palpimanoides | ||||||||||||
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Huttonia palpimanoides , male |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name of the family | ||||||||||||
| Huttoniidae | ||||||||||||
| Simon , 1893 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the genus | ||||||||||||
| Huttonia | ||||||||||||
| O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1879 | ||||||||||||
| Scientific name of the species | ||||||||||||
| Huttonia palpimanoides | ||||||||||||
| O. Pickard-Cambridge , 1879 |
Huttonia palpimanoides is a species of real spiders and is endemic to New Zealand . It is the only species of the genus Huttonia within the monogeneric family Huttoniidae . (As of June 2016)
description
Huttonia palpimanoides is four to five millimeters long. The carapace of the prosoma is rounded without an offset head region, the opisthosoma is oval and significantly longer than it is wide. On the prosoma there are eight eyes in two rows, the front ones being significantly smaller than the back ones. The chelicerae are short but strongly built with conical appendages in opposition to the short claw, but without real teeth. The opening of the venom gland in the claw segment of the chelicere sits on a short, lobed appendix near its tip, the gland itself lies in the prosoma. The endites (chewing of the basal phalanx of the pedipalps) meet in the middle in front of the tip of the triangular labium. The sternum is shield-shaped and a little longer than it is wide, the hips (coxes) of the fourth pair of legs are broadly separated. There is feathered hair on the abdomen, and at the end it has six functioning spinnerets. The spider silk produced is ecribellate . The legs have three claws. Only the back two pairs of legs have spurs. The tarsi and metatarsi of the first two pairs of legs have spatulate hair arranged in rows, but no real scopulae . The metatarsus of the third pair of legs has a short bristle comb in both sexes. In the male, the end members of the pedipalps have no spurs or protrusions. The globe is hidden in a deep cavity in the cymbium and hidden by hair when at rest and is not visible, the embolus is usually relatively short and has thorns, and in an (undescribed) species it is elongated. The sexual organs of the females are simple, without externally recognizable structures and thus without epigyne , a non-sclerotized central receptacle is enclosed on both sides by a sclerotized plate.
Way of life
The spiders are habitat specialists and live on low, dead fern fronds in the rainforest . There they build a bag-shaped hiding place. From there they hunt their prey freely without the help of a net. In captivity, they can be fed with numerous small and soft-skinned insects or with the land-living amphipods, which are not uncommon on the rainforest floor and in their habitat .
Taxonomy
For the family and the genus is currently only Huttonia palpimanoides the only extant type described . From their habitat, however, a number of morphologically well distinguishable but previously undescribed species are known, some of which may have to be placed in a second genus or also in Huttonia . Other animals belonging to the family have been found in Canadian amber from the Cretaceous period without any species having been described. Huttonia palpimanoides was described in 1879 by the British clergyman and arachnologist Octavius Pickard-Cambridge using a female that was sent to him by Captain Frederick Wollaston Hutton from Dunedin , New Zealand. After that, no other specimen was found for almost a hundred years. The French arachnologist Eugène Simon established a monotypical subfamily of its own for the species in the Palpimanidae family , which was later transferred to the Zodariidae family by Alexander Ivanovich Petrunkewitsch . Raymond R. Forster and Norman I. Platnick raised them to an independent family in 1984. According to morphological criteria, the little investigated family forms a clade with the Stenochilidae and Palpimanidae .
Web links
Huttonia palpimanoides in the World Spider Catalog
literature
- Raymond R. Forster & Norman I. Platnick (1984): A review of the archaeid spiders and their relatives, with notes on the limits of the superfamily Palpimanoidea (Arachnida, Araneae). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, 178, 1–106 ( PDF ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Natural History Museum of the Burgergemeinde Bern: World Spider Catalog Version 17.0 - Huttoniidae . Retrieved June 20, 2016.
- ^ David Penney & Paul A. Selden (2006): First fossil Huttoniidae (Arthropoda: Chelicerata: Araneae) in late Cretaceous Canadian amber. Cretaceous Research, 27, pp. 442-446 doi : 10.1016 / j.cretres.2005.07.002 .