I’m a little curious about the recent excision of Dolomedidae from Pisauridae. It seemed convenient to group the “nursery webs” under one group, but the recent study opposed the monophyly of Pisauridae, excluding Dolomedidae. The abstract mentioned that a couple other Lycosoid families also build nursery webs (viz. Ctenidae, Trechaleidae, and Oxyopidae), which got me wondering whether all these families form a clade, or if nursery webs are a feature that evolved five times independently? Pisaurid nursery webs seem pretty similar to Dolomedid ones, and both groups carry their egg sacs by their mouth: are the practices of these other three families similar?
1 Like
i believe you meant this paper - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1055790324002392
there is also recent open paper that would interest you - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/zsc.12719 - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.23.609317v2
well they are all in Lycosoidea now - so it is a clade.
well depends on species. as the paper already mentioned - “similar structures are built by some members of Ctenidae, Trechaleidae, and Oxyopidae.” you have to browse species observations on iNat or studies of any particular ones.
1 Like
i think most oxyopids and ctenids secure their egg sacs to a substrate and then guard it, rather than carry it around (at least some ctenids, namely genus Ctenus, do carry their egg sac around by holding it in their chelicerae the same way pisaurids and dolomedids do)
trechaleidae handle eggs more like wolf spiders do - they carry their egg sac affixed to their spinnerets, and then carry their spiderlings for a few days. unlike wolf spiders, which carry the spiderlings on their abdomen and drop the empty egg sac, trechaleid spiderlings cling to the empty egg sac which the mother continues to carry.
1 Like