INTRODUCTION

This project started with the seemingly modest goal of reviewing the status of the spider family Lamponidae Simon. At the outset, the family was relatively small. In the process of investigating the limits and relationships of the various families of ground spiders, Platnick (1990) restricted the classical family Gnaphosidae to those taxa in which the piriform gland spigots on the anterior lateral spinnerets have greatly enlarged and widened shafts. As a result, three out of the 215 or so genera that had previously been placed in that family had to be moved out of the group. Two of those genera had characters that allowed them to placed in one of the other gnaphosoid families, but the Australasian genus Lampona Simon was not so cooperative and Simon's (1893) group Lamponeae was therefore elevated to the family level. At the start of the present project, then, the family Lamponidae contained a single genus and 17 described species, known only from Australia and New Zealand.

Of those species, only one, Lampona cylindrata (L. Koch), was at all well known. That animal is commonly called the "white-tailed spider" because of the conspicuous white spot found at the back of the abdomen, just above the spinnerets. It is among the most frequently collected spiders in Australia, not only because of its size (it is easily the largest species of Lampona) but also because, even though it does live in native forests, it is also synanthropic. These spiders are commonly found in and around buildings, where they will fearlessly invade the webs of other spiders (including those of the large species of Badumna Thorell that are frequently found around houses as well). As a result of their synanthropic habits, the species is occasionally found in odd places (such as the specimen recorded below from "inside a plastic-wrapped head of lettuce."

In recent years, Lampona cylindrata has received a considerable amount of publicity, especially in the Australian popular press. Because of its synanthropic habits, there are occasional cases of bites in humans, and some workers, such as Sutherland (1987, 1991) and Gray (1989), have suggested that the species is responsible for cases where bites have led to severe necrosis. There seems to be little evidence for that suggestion; the cases involving severe necrotic lesions have not been accompanied by captured specimens of the spiders involved, and in the bite cases where Lampona specimens have been recovered, the symptoms of the bites have not been severe (White, Hirst, and Hender, 1989; Raven and Harvey, 1991). Harvey and Raven (1991) suggested that the cases of severe necrotic lesions might have been caused by mycobacteria, perhaps carried on spider mouthparts, rather than by spider venom per se.

In addition, laboratory study of Lampona venom (Atkinson and Wright, 1991) did not find any severe reactions. Unfortunately, that particular study has turned out to be less than definitive. As indicated below, what has commonly been referred to as Lampona cylindrata is actually a complex of three closely related species. One (the true L. cylindrata) is common throughout southern Australia; a second species (Lampona murina L. Koch) occurs only on the east coast, being most common in Queensland and becoming progressively less common at higher latitudes in New South Wales and into Victoria, and a third (Lampona papua, Platnick) is known only from New Guinea. As it happens, the spiders whose venoms were examined and found to be harmless by Atkinson and Wright (1991) were from the Toowoomba, Queensland, area, and thus were almost certainly members of L. murina rather than L. cylindrata. Because it is possible that the increased size of L. cylindrata has been accompanied by an increase in the virulence of its venom, toxicological studies of southern specimens would be welcome. A recent report of sexual dimorphism in L. cylindrata venom activity (Rash et. al, 1998), presumably based on specimens from Victoria, may have been compromised by mixed samples of L. cylindrata and L. murina.

The process of investigating the diversity of L. cylindrata and its relatives turned out to be a much larger project than could have been predicted. As argued below, the Lamponidae are actually a very diverse family, members of which have frequently been misplaced not only in the Gnaphosidae but even in some non-gnaphosoid families, such as the Clubionidae or Corinnidae. Thanks to numerous newly available collections, the family is relimited here to include not just Lampona, but a total of three subfamilies (two of them new), 22 genera (17 of them new), and 190 species (171 of them new).

Dealing with this unexpected diversity has been challenging, particularly as some the taxa (such as Lampona itself) have relatively simple genitalia, impeding both the discrimination of species and the matching of males and females. Arachnologists have historically taken different approaches to the latter problem. When working with relatively small samples, it is frequently the case that males and females have never been taken together. Faced with such difficulties, some workers have routinely described the sexes separately, so that the resulting species names are frequently synonymized when further collecting allows likely matches to be made. However, that approach can result in significant overestimates of the actual diversity of various groups within particular regions. With the increased public awareness of the importance of biodiversity, and the vast amount of information on habitat diversity potentially offered by megadiverse groups like spiders, it does not seem appropriate to bias diversity estimates in that manner.

Instead, I have adopted the viewpoint that the relevant null hypothesis, within any group being examined, is that all the specimens belong to a single species, and that additional evidence is required to support each and every increase in the number of species hypothesized to exist. As a result, it is likely that some of the samples here hypothesized to be conspecific will subsequently be found to be composites of more than one taxon. For example, consider the new genus described below as Lamponoides. At present, this curious taxon is known from a total of two specimens, a male taken in New South Wales and a female taken in Queensland. This is obviously an unsatisfactory situation, and my colleagues and I have therefore attempted to collect additional specimens at both of those localities. In both cases, other quite unusual lamponids were collected, but no additional specimens of Lamponoides have been forthcoming. The two specimens seem to have congruent relationships; the male seems to represent the sister group of the males assigned below to the genus Lamponina Strand, new rank, and the female seems to represent the sister group of the females assigned below to Lamponina. It therefore seem reasonable to suggest that the two isolated specimens are congeneric. Given the distance and ecological differences between the localities at which they were collected, it is certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that they represent two different species of Lamponoides. However, at present there is no direct evidence to suggest that they are not conspecific as well as congeneric, and the null hypothesis that they are conspecific is therefore accepted.

To help restrict the results to a manageable size, species descriptions have been kept as short as possible, with most of the important information appearing in the figures, maps, keys, diagnoses, and lists of material examined. Measurements have been made only of total body length of single specimens, and reported only to the nearest 0.1 mm, as they provide little information beyond an indication that one is in the right "ballpark" when trying to identify a species not seen before.