After
the 15th International Congress of Arachnology in Badplaas, South Africa,
I took the opportunity together with some colleagues to participate in
a collecting trip through eastern South Africa. We visited some game reserves
in KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland, driving down from Badplaas to Durban.
It
was not only about spiders, and we were all impressed by the beauty and
many riches of this country. As usual, I focused on pholcids, and after
the few days we spent collecting, I had more species of pholcids in my
vials than had been known from the entire country before.
Back
home (in Vienna at that time) I started to work on the new material, and
on the great recent collections I had borrowed from various South African
and other museums. It turned out that South Africa is home to a very species-rich
genus, now called Quamtana.
Two species had actually been known before, but they had been erroneously
assigned to Pholcus. In addition, I described 23 new species, most
of them from South Africa (Huber
2003c).
Even
so, a lot remains to be done regarding South African pholcids. For example,
we collected the genus Leptopholcus
which has not been recorded for South Africa before. Species-rich and in
need of revision is also the genus Smeringopus.