THE AMERICAN ORB WEAVERS OF THE GENERA MECYNOGEA, MANOGEA, KAPOGEA AND CYRTOPHORA (ARANEAE: ARANEIDAE) HERBERT W. LEVI^ Abstract. Nine species of Mecynogea are known, of which five are new: bA'o from Mexico, one from Colombia, one from Brazil, and one apparently wide-spread from \'enezuela to Mato Grosso state, Brazil. For the common southeastern North American Mc-ci/nogeo lemniscata, new records are given from southern Brazil to northern Argentina. Manogea is a new genus with the common and widespread t)pe species M. porracea and two new species, one in Central America, the other in northern Colombia and Venezuela. The four widespread American species previously placed in Cyi-topliora are here placed in a new genus, Kapogea. These four species are difficult to distinguish using the genitalia as characters. The Old World Ci/i-toplwrci citricola has recently been found in Colombia, where it damages trees. There are 17 new synonyms. INTRODUCTION This is one of a series of revisions of the Neotropical orb weaver genera. Prexious publications are cited in Levi (1993, 1996). In preparation are a ke)' to the known gen-era of the American araneid orb weavers and revisions of the remaining unrevised araneid genera: Cijclosa, MoUnarnnea, Mastophora, Agathostichus, Mangora, Eustala and Verrucosa. The orb weavers placed in the genera Mecynogea and Cijrtophora form a dis-tinct group in the faniih' Araneidae: their webs are horizontal, often dome-shaped, and supported by a tangled webbing. They are believed to lack viscid silk in the web (Kovoor and Lopez, 19S2), and the dome has an extremely small, dry silk mesh (Plates 1, 2). Unlike other orb weavers. ' Museum of Comparative Zoologv; Harvard Univer-sitv, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. they do not reconstruct the web on a daily basis and may not remove old webs, but build a new one above the old (Plate 2C) (Lubin, personal communication). Where-as their silk glands differ from those of other araneids (Kovoor and Lopez, 1982, 1988), the external appearance of these spiders is not as distinct from other ara-neids as one might expect. Differences in their spinnerets are described by Codding-ton (1989) and Peters (1993). Peters also showed a secondar>' loss of some silk spig-ots in older spiders. There is literature (Carico, 1984; Hie-ber, 1984) on the behavior and ecology of the basilica spider, Mecynogea lemniscata, and a recent paper by Willey et al. (1992) cites previous papers. Wise (1993), in his volume on the ecology of spiders, has many citations for Mecynogea lemniscata. The Zoological Record cites numerous pa-pers on several Cyrtophora species. How-ever, there is no literature on Manogea species, presumably because of the past difficulty of identifying the common M. porracea, and there is no literature on the species of Kapogea, \v4iich are less often collected despite the large size of females. I am obliged to the curators and their assistants for making the collections avail-able. I also thank M. E. Galiano for spec-imens (deposited in MACN) and C. L. Scioscia and P. Vanzolini for locating col-lecting sites. J. Carico, W Eberhard, C. Hieber, Y. Lubin, N. C. Mesa C. and M. Robinson provided information on habits of the spiders. J. Coddington and Y. Lubin provided photographs. I am thankful to L. Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., 155(5): 215-255, October, 1997 215
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