Meeting Abstract
Spiders in the family Agelenidae, and particularly the Agelenine subfamily, is common in Holarctic faunas, with 1287 species described in 80 genera. The growth of DNA barcoding allowed us to gather a broad dataset of Agelenine taxa, representing 20 genera in the subfamily, and covering nearly the geographic range of the group, including North America, Europe, and Asia. We developed a core taxon set (30 individuals from 9 genera representing North America, Europe, and Asia) with data from between 3 and 6 mitochondrial and nuclear loci, combining lab data, previously published data, and newly generated sequences. We subsequently added databased barcode sequences from 83 additional individuals. We performed Bayesian MCMC analysis, using a GTR+I+G model for 50,000,000 generations, to estimate a phylogeny for the Ageleninae and Tegeneriinae, with an orb-weaver as outgroup. The North American taxa split into two groups, a clade including the Western and Central American genera, and one including the widespread and Gulf Coast genera, and thus the continental assemblage of Agelenines appears diphyletic, but neither of these groups’ affinities with European taxa were resolved with statistical support in the Bayesian analysis. Subsequent tree-searches using alternate criteria showed little improvement in resolving the polytomy of these three major groups.
