The poor documentation of spider diversity of Pakistan reflects, in part, the paucity of taxonomic specialists working on the group. The limited knowledge of the spider fauna of Pakistan is a particular example of the barrier to our general understanding of spider biodiversity in a global context, a factor compromising both scientific progress and conservation efforts. Considering the country’s diverse ecosystems, this count must seriously underestimate the true diversity of its fauna given the much higher numbers reported for India (1686) and Iran (528). Examination of prior taxonomic work ( S1 Table) indicates that just 400 species of spiders have been documented from Pakistan. For example, in her dissertation research on spiders of Punjab, Parveen reported the discovery of 33 new species but only one has been formally described. It is likely that many species reported as new discoveries from Pakistan await description. Unfortunately, these publications often employ invalid or incorrect species names or only identify specimens to a family, compromising their value. Although studies on the spider fauna of Pakistan began nearly a century ago, work has recently intensified, but most of these studies have produced regional checklists ( S1 Table). By contrast, just 2,300 species have been reported from South Asia, suggesting that many species await detection in this region. Prior studies have documented 4,300 spider species in Europe and a similar number (3,800) in the Nearctic. With nearly 48,000 known species in 117 families, spiders are a major component of terrestrial ecosystems with important practical applications as biocontrol agents and as bio-indicators. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is a contribution to the Food From Thought project supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund awarded to PDNH. Sequence analysis was made possible by a grant from the Government of Canada through Genome Canada and Ontario Genomics in support of the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) project awarded to PDNH. 20-1403/R& D/09 “Sequencing DNA Barcodes of Economically Important Insect Species from Pakistan” from the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan awarded to MA. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Collection data, a photograph, a taxonomic assignment, and DNA barcode (COI-5p) sequence for each specimen are available in the public dataset, "DS-MASPD DNA barcoding spiders of Pakistan" on the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) ( ( dx.doi.org/10.5883/DS-MASPD).įunding: This study was enabled by grant 106106-001 “Engaging Developing Nations in iBOL” from the International Development Research Centre in Canada and by grant HEC No. Received: JanuAccepted: Published: May 22, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Ashfaq et al. (2019) Assembling a DNA barcode reference library for the spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) of Pakistan. The discovery of many new, potentially endemic species and the low level of BIN overlap with other nations highlight the importance of constructing regional DNA barcode reference libraries.Ĭitation: Ashfaq M, Blagoev G, Tahir HM, Khan AM, Mukhtar MK, Akhtar S, et al. Most (75%) BINs detected in this study were new to science, while those shared with other nations mainly derived from India. Intraspecific divergence values were not significantly correlated with geographic distance. Excepting one species pair ( Oxyopes azhari– Oxyopes oryzae), the maximum intraspecific distance was always less than the nearest-neighbor (NN) distance. Maximum conspecific divergences ranged from 0–5.3% while congeneric distances varied from 2.8–23.2%. Specimens of 109 morphological species were assigned to 123 BINs with ten species showing BIN splits, while 93 interim species included representatives of 98 BINs. COI sequences >400 bp recovered from 1,782 specimens were analyzed using neighbor-joining trees, Bayesian inference, barcode gap, and Barcode Index Numbers (BINs). Morphological study of 1,795 spiders from sites across Pakistan placed these specimens in 27 families and 202 putative species.
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