Talk:Trichonephila

Wiki Education assignment: Invertebrate Zoology

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 11 January 2022 and 25 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Gamecockstudent (article contribs).

External Anatomy and Behaviour: too specific and not specific enough?

The external anatomy section just describes spider anatomy in general with no reference to the particular biology of Trichonephila. I've added a link to the spider anatomy page, but is this section really needed at all? I think if anyone can add information about what makes this genus different from other genera in Nephilidae, keep it, but as it stands it's redundant.

The behaviour section is inaccurate: Trichonephila very rarely display sexual cannibalism as the males are simply too small to be of much nutritional value and pose little threat. They also can't have evolved the preference for a small partner over the last few decades, this would be a much longer process. The courtship and sexual dimorphism section seem like they could be amalgamated into one.

Some of the statements here and in the adaptations section are also too specific to particular species in Trichonephila, and should be added to those articles, rather than the genus page. Also, some of the distribution and taxonomy information needs updating and reference formatting could do with a cleanup too. Can someone else weigh in on how much of this needs copyediting? Mediocre.marsupial (talk) 05:23, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Virtuall all the stuff that is not specific to this genus or is inaccurate needs to be removed. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:57, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Since that description applies to nearly all the text in the 'Description' and 'Behaviour' sections, would it be best to delete those sections entirely or rewrite them per WP:PRESERVE? If I try to fix what's already there, what should I add? Most of the literature focuses on individual species within Trichonephila, so I'm hesitant to extrapolate anything based on one species in the genus to the entire genus.

In a cursory search I only found a few articles focusing on just Trichonephila, not any one species within it, since it's been considered part of Nephila for so long. One of those articles is the one elevating Trichonephila to genus and is already mentioned here, and the other is a comparison of silk properties within the genus, which is really cool but might be better included on the spider silk page rather than here. Could use Turk et al's paper for distribution, but other than that a lot of the literature describing behaviour and morphology applies to Nephila, T. clavipes, or T. clavata and again I'm not sure how much can be used from those last two as two species don't represent the whole genus.

In short, I'm really not sure how to fix this, or if it should be fixed rather than deleted. Mediocre.marsupial (talk) 07:22, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I'd accept deletion as better than it is now. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:05, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, deletion is one of the options we could take to improve this article. What I'm saying is that I'm not sure whether deletion or rewriting the article would be the best course of action. If all the problematic text were to be deleted and not replaced, the article would barely even be a stub. Mediocre.marsupial (talk) 22:43, 6 November 2024 (UTC)