Gustavo Hormiga

TL;DR: A phylogenetic analysis of spiders using a dataset of 932 spider species, representing 115 families (only the family Synaphridae is unrepresented), 700 known genera, and additional representatives of 26 unidentified or undescribed genera is presented.

TL;DR: It is concluded that the taxon sample included in the previous orbicularian data matrix is adequate to test the phylogenetic placement of Acrobleps in Anapidae but insufficient to significantly assess web evolution within Araneoidea.

TL;DR: While the spinning complement of single pairs of glands does not change much over the evolution of the group, multiple sets of glands are dramatically reduced in number, implying that derived araneoids are incapable of spinning many silk fibers at the same time.

TL;DR: The lognormal distribution deserves greater consideration as a richness estimator when undersampling bias is severe, and should be the default null hypothesis for singleton frequencies.

TL;DR: It is shown that phylogenetic signal for the monophyly of Arachnida is restricted to the 500 slowest-evolving genes in the data set, and that outgroup selection without regard for branch length distribution exacerbates long-branch attraction artifacts and does not mitigate gene-tree discordance, regardless of high gene representation for outgroups that are model organisms.