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 is also the genus Smeringopus (in the meantime revised: Huber 2012). |