New records of <em>Cladomelea</em> from South Africa, including the first records of <em>C. longipes </em>(O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877) (Araneae, Araneidae) outside its type locality

Check List 15(6): 1071-1075, doi: 10.15560/15.6.1071

New records of Cladomelea from South Africa, including the first records of C. longipes (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877) (Araneae, Araneidae) outside its type locality

Anna Sophia Dippenaar-Schoeman^‡§, Stefan Hendrik Foord^‡

‡ University of Venda, Thohoyandou, South Africa§ Plant Health and Protection, Agricultural Research Council, Pretoria, South Africa

Corresponding author: Anna Sophia Dippenaar-Schoeman ( dippenaara@arc.agric.za )

Corresponding author: Stefan Hendrik Foord ( stefan.foord@gmail.com )

Academic editor: Alireza Zamani

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Dippenaar-Schoeman AS, Foord SH (2019) New records of Cladomelea from South Africa, including the first records of C. longipes (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877) (Araneae, Araneidae) outside its type locality. Check List 15(6): 1071-1075. https://doi.org/10.15560/15.6.1071

Abstract

We present the first records of the bolas spider, Cladomelea longipes (O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1877), beyond its type locality, resulting in a considerable extension of its geographic range in Africa. We compare C. longipes with the two other species of Cladomelea known from South Africa, C. akermani Hewitt, 1923 and C. debeeri Roff & Dippenaar-Schoeman, 2004. Images of live specimens and a distribution map are provided. Cladomelea longipes is very rare locally but has a relatively large geographical distribution in the Afrotropical Region.

Keywords

Cladomelea akermani, Cladomelea debeeri, geographical distribution, Zimbabwe, Cameroon