Orchid Island, 92 km off the southeast coast of Taiwan, has the northernmost tropical forests in East Asia. We assessed effects of habitat management by Orchid Island inhabitants, the Yami people, on spider diversity by comparing assemblages collected from the ground to canopy among four habitats (natural forest, cultivated woodland, second growth forest and grasslands) that receive different degrees of disturbance. Species and guild composition did not differ among replicates of habitat but differed significantly among habitats. Variation in spider diversity was inversely correlated with vegetation density. Cultivated woodland subjected to an intermediate level of disturbances had a lower understory vegetation density than natural forest, but higher spider diversity. Neither insect abundance nor biomass varied significantly among habitats suggesting little room for effects of prey availability on spider diversity. It appears that the Yami people maintain high spider diversity on Orchid Island by generating novel habitat types with different vegetation structures and disturbance regimes
The genus Chrysilla Thorell 1887 (Araneae: Salticidae) is currently comprised of ten species, and widely distributed through South and Southeast Asia (World Spider Catalog 2017). The species of Chrysilla show distinct sexual dimorphism in proportion of body parts and coloration in the adult stage. Therefore, the recognition of conspecific male and female based on only morphology more or less includes uncertainty. Recent works based on DNA barcoding have revealed male/female combination in salticids showing distinct sexual dimorphism, and subsequently it has been solving synonymies (Suguro & Yahata 2014;Phung et al. 2016).The type species of this genus, Chrysilla lauta Thorell 1887, has been described on the basis of a male specimen from Myanmar. The female has been recorded very recently in Zhang & Wang (2017), however, it does not include descriptions of taxonomically important characters such as the palp of males and the epigyne of females. Therefore, the detailed description of the both sexes is still necessary. In the present study, we redescribe C. lauta with detailed morphological descriptions based on the holotype and confirm the correct male/female combination by DNA barcoding.
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