THE NEOTROPICAL AND MEXICAN SPECIES OF THE ORB-WEAVER GENERA ARANEUS, DUBIEPEIRA, AND ACULEPEIRA (ARANEAE: ARANEIDAE) HERBERT W. LEVI 1 Abstract. Although Araneus species are mainly Holarctic, 113 species are found in Mexico and the Neotropics. Of these, 43 species (38%) were previ-ously known. Twenty names are newly synonymized. The greatest diversity in morphology and number of species is found in Mexico and Central America. South American species of this genus are difficult to separate for several reasons: most species for which both males and females are known belong to the same species group, resulting in a fauna of closely-related, similar species. Furthermore, several species are unusually variable. An additional difficulty is that the species-characteristic embolus of the male palpus is often hidden in the contracted palpus. The new genus Dubiepeira, with the type species Metepeira dubitata Soares and Camargo, contains five species found in the Amazon drainage, only two of which were previously known. Of 13 species found in the area and placed in Aculepeira, six were previously known, seven are new. One of these is Holarctic, five are South American. Six species of which males are unknown, all coming from Hispaniola, Mexico, and Central America, may not belong to Aculepeira. A list gives the generic placement of 186 names previously catalogued in the genus Araneus. Another list gives 72 names that cannot be recognized because types are immature or lost, and illustrations inade-quate. INTRODUCTION In 1969, when I started revising Neo-tropical and Nearctic species of Araneidae, I made an extensive visit to the British Museum to acquaint myself with various genera of Araneidae and Tetragnathidae. There I made pencil drawings of genitalia and habitus of type species of the Pickard-1 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard Uni-versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Cambridge and Keyserling collections. I revised the Nearctic species first because data for them were much more complete than for the Neotropical species. In the course of my work, I illustrated the geni-talia of type species of all genera, and of types of the Neotropical species of the gen-era I was revising, and thus gathered a large collection of notes and illustrations. (I have made copies of these illustrations available to colleagues who work with orb weavers.) I expected work on Neotropical araneids to proceed rapidly but due to the huge collections that have accumulated, especially in Brazil but also in the AMNH and MCZ, the research has been slowed. The most important part of a revision is to examine, redescribe and illustrate the type specimens of previously named spe-cies, and compare them with specimens of the collections on hand. Many old type specimens had never been illustrated; of-ten the species were distinguished by col-oration. Even though old type specimens are usually those of the most common spe-cies, often their identity remains un-known. The scarcity of specimens caused early arachnologists to name males and fe-males separately; often a species was named a second or third time for specimens col-lected in a different country. The least im-portant part of a revision is the description of new species, as the new species are likely to be less common. In this revision, as in two previous ones, only about one-third of the species were previously known, two-thirds are new. There are 20 new syno-Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., 152(4): 167-315, January, 1991 167
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