Holarchaea is a genus of South Pacific araneomorph spiders in the family Anapidae, and was first described by Raymond Robert Forster in 1955.[2] As of May 2019 it contains only two species, H. globosa and H. novaeseelandiae, but there may still be undescribed species in New Zealand.[3]

Holarchaea
Holarchaea species from New Zealand, possibly Holarchaea novaeseelandiae
Scientific classification Edit this classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Chelicerata
Class: Arachnida
Order: Araneae
Infraorder: Araneomorphae
Family: Anapidae
Genus: Holarchaea
Forster, 1955[1]
Type species
H. novaeseelandiae
(Forster, 1949)
Species

These spiders are shiny black to beige, and grow up to 1.5 millimetres (0.059 in) long.[3] They are one of few spider taxa that do not have venom glands.[4]

They are known only from the forests of Tasmania and New Zealand, where they live in many microhabitats that regularly have high humidity.[3][1] Originally placed with the assassin spiders, it was moved to its own family, Holarchaeidae, in 1984,[5] and Holarchaeidae was synonymized with Anapidae in 2017.[6]

References

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  1. ^ a b Gloor, Daniel; Nentwig, Wolfgang; Blick, Theo; Kropf, Christian (2019). "Gen. Holarchaea Forster, 1955". World Spider Catalog Version 20.0. Natural History Museum Bern. doi:10.24436/2. Retrieved 2019-06-11.
  2. ^ Forster, R. R. (1955). "Spiders of the family Archaeidae from Australia and New Zealand". Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand. 83: 391–403.
  3. ^ a b c Rix, Michael G. "Holarchaeid Spiders". Australian Arachnological Society. Retrieved 2016-09-23.
  4. ^ Meier, J.; White, J., eds. (1995). Handbook of Clinical Toxicology of Animal Venoms and Poisons. CRC Press.
  5. ^ Forster, R. R.; Platnick, N. I. (1984). "A review of the archaeid spiders and their relatives, with notes on the limits of the superfamily Palpimanoidea (Arachnida, Araneae)" (PDF). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. 178: 71.
  6. ^ Dimitrov, D.; et al. (2017). "Rounding up the usual suspects: a standard target-gene approach for resolving the interfamilial phylogenetic relationships of ecribellate orb-weaving spiders with a new family-rank classification (Araneae, Araneoidea)". Cladistics. 33 (3): 240. doi:10.1111/cla.12165.