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). |