THE NEOTROPICAL ORB-WEAVING SPIDERS OF THE GENERA WIXIA, POZONIA, AND OCREPEIRA (ARANEAE: ARANEIDAE) HERBERT W. LEVI 1 Abstract. The species previously placed in Wixia fall into three distinct genera: Wixia, Pozonia, and Ocrepeira. Wixia is known from only one pair of adults collected recently and the holotype collected in the last century, and several immatures, all from the Amazon region. Three species of Pozonia, all previously known, are distributed from Mexico and the West Indies to Paraguay. Ocrepeira contains 67 species, two north of Mexico and 65 from Mexico to Argentina and Chile. Forty-six of the Ocrepeira spe-cies are new (70% of the species) while 18 (30%) were previously known. There are eight new synonyms of the 18 previously known names. Two North Ameri-can species of Wixia are transferred to Ocrepeira. The species of the three genera differ in the shape of the carapace and the abdomen. The few webs that are known, made by species of Pozonia and Ocrepeira, are complete orbs placed almost vertically. INTRODUCTION The family of araneid orb weavers, Ar-aneidae, is the third largest spider family. The only larger ones are the jumping spi-ders (Salticidae) and the mainly Holarctic Linyphiidae. Comprehensive revisions and keys covering the whole Neotropics are not available for either of these families. Per-haps half of the Neotropical araneid orb weavers have now been revised. The first revisions of Neotropical species were made together with the Nearctic species: Gea and Argiope (Levi, 1968), Neoscona (Ber-man and Levi, 1971), and Eriophora (Levi, 1971). These will eventually be updated. The first revision of the Neotropical ara-neids was that of Micrathena and Chae-tacis (Levi, 1985), followed by Alpaida 1 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard Uni-versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. (Levi, 1988), Witica (Levi, 1986), Epei-roides, Bertrana, and Amazonepeira (Levi, 1989), Araneus, Dubiepeira, and Acule-peira, (Levi, 1991a), Larinia (Harrod et al., 1991), Ed ricus and Wagneriana (Levi, 1991b), and Parawixia (Levi, 1992). My goal has always been to make it pos-sible to determine animals so that they can be used for research. When I started work, it was a longstanding tradition that system-atists would determine animals for biolo-gists in other fields. However, it seemed absurd to me that systematists spent their time identifying specimens, rather than working on revisions and making this knowledge directly available to these spe-cialists. Revisions allow the identification of specimens and also provide a context for the naming of new species. Naming of new species should not be attempted be-fore the genus has been revised and com-mon species, named in the last century, illustrated and their variation noted. When I started work, there were few spider specialists in North America. When Jocelyn Crane worked on the behavior of Venezuelan jumping spiders (1948), she first had to do the taxonomic work herself. At the same time, Kaston published Spi-ders of Connecticut (1948). This work showed the value of a clear text and good illustrations in taxonomic work. Spiders can readily be identified with short, well-il-lustrated descriptions such as these, but not with lengthy, elaborate descriptions ac-companied by poor illustrations (for ex-ample, Petrunkevitch, 1925). Therefore, my descriptions of Neotropical orb weav-ers are accompanied by drawings of sev-Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., 153(2): 47-141, April, 1993 47
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