THE ORB-WEAVER GENERA ARGIOPE, GEA, AND NEOGEA FROM THE WESTERN PACIFIC REGION (ARANEAE: ARANEIDAE, ARGIOPINAE) HERBERT W. LEVP Abstract. Characters of the male, especially of the male palpus, are useful for studying the phylogeny of the Argiopinae. Members of the subfamily are relati\eK primitive Araneidae; they appear more ad-\anced than the Nephilinae, Metinae, Tetragnathin-ae, and C>rtophorinae, and less advanced than the Mastophorinae, Gasteracanthinae, and Araneinae. All available types of Pacific and eastern Asian Argiope species names have been examined. The stud\ was handicapped by lack of males, which are collected less often than the large, showy females. The subfamily Argiopinae contains three genera: Argiope, Gea, and the new Neogea. Neogea, with the type Araneus egregiiis, also contains Gea nocti-color. In the region, there are 49 species of Argiope, 7 species of Gea, and 2 species of Neogea, many of them widely distributed. The 12 new species are Ar-giope dietrichae, A. katherina. A. kochi, A. mascor-di, A. radon from Australia; A. boesenbergi from Japan; A. ponape and A. triik from the Caroline Is-lands; A. Caledonia from New Caledonia; A. manila from the Philippines; A. thai from Thailand; and Gea eff from New Guinea. The generic names Aus-trargiope. Coganargiope, Mesargiope, Micrargiope, Chaetargiope, and Neargiope of Kishida and Brach-ygea Caporiacco are subjective synonyms of Ar-giope. Argiope aequior and viabilior are oxyopids; aurea and sachalinensis are Araneus; lepida is probably an Acusilas: leucopicta is a Cyrtophora. Gea virginis is a Leucauge. There are 57 new synonymies. INTRODUCTION I undertook this study in order to solve the relationship of the genera Argiope and ' Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard Uni-versity, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Gea to Araneus and other orb-weavers. Other reasons for this revision are to make possible the identification and naming of these common, large, showy spiders from the western Pacific area, and to distin-guish the related genera Argiope and Gea. My studies of American Araneidae be-gan with Argiope (1968) because these could easily be sorted from specimens of other genera. Since this was the first genus examined, analysis of the relationships was not possible. Another limiting factor was that there are only two Argiope species in Europe, and only seven of Argiope and one of Gea in the Americas (one addition-al Argiope from Brazil has been found since the publication of my 1968 revision). Only now that I have a fair knowledge of the temperate American and central Eu-ropean araneid fauna am I beginning to discern affinities. In contrast, the western Pacific region is extremely rich in orb-weavers; 49 species of Argiope, 7 of Gea, and 2 of a new ge-nus, Neogea, are illustrated here. The abundance of species is greatest in New Guinea and Australia. I hoped that by studying a great diversity of species I would develop some insight into which characters are primitive and which spe-cialized. Because of the increasing amount of lit-erature and the popularity of the large diurnal Argiope species for ethological and ecological studies (Robinson and Robin-Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., 150(5): 247-338, December, 1983 247
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