Short-legged daddy longlegs: An integrative and comprehensive approach to unravel the evolution of the enigmatic spiders of the daddy longlegs subfamily Ninetinae (Araneae: Pholcidae)

爸爸长腿蜘蛛亚科九条蛛目前由不超过31个已描述的物种组成。大多数是小到小的神秘的地面居民，局限于新大陆、非洲和阿拉伯半岛的干旱栖息地。因此，九头亚科在收藏品中的代表性很差，几乎没有用于分子工作的新材料，而且对它们的生物学几乎一无所知。与此同时，初步的和部分未公布的数据表明，九头亚科在几个方面确实值得特别关注：(1)它们似乎是Pholsidae中的“基本”，因此对于重建该科的进化史至关重要；(2)它们在许多方面和部分上与其他Pholsidae不同，包括形态(例如腿长、精子形态)、生物学(例如网络构建、雌性精子储存)和生态学(例如干旱栖息地)。然而，在基于桑格的六基因分析中，它们的确切系统发育位置无法确定；关于精子形态的研究只有一个物种；我们对九亚科生物学的所有了解都来自轶事现场观察和标签数据。目前的项目旨在通过一项大规模的合作努力来揭开这些神秘蜘蛛的进化。我们将结合五个国家的十人团队的专业知识，在三个相互关联的领域应用最先进的方法论：分类学和进化论、生物地理学和进化形态学和生物学。

The daddy longlegs spider subfamily Ninetinae is composed of currently no more than 31 described species. Most are small to tiny cryptic ground-dwellers and restricted to arid habitats in the New World, Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. As a result, Ninetinae are poorly represented in collections, fresh material for molecular work is barely available, and almost nothing is known about their biology. At the same time, preliminary and partly unpublished data show that Ninetinae do deserve special attention in several respects: (1) they seem to be 'basal' within Pholcidae and thus crucial for reconstructing the evolutionary history of the family; (2) they differ from other Pholcidae in many and partly dramatic ways, including morphology (e.g. leg length, sperm morphology), biology (e.g. web building, female sperm storage), and ecology (e.g. arid habitats). However, their exact phylogenetic position could not be resolved in a Sanger-based six-gene analysis; only a single species has been studied with respect to sperm morphology; all we know about Ninetinae biology comes from anecdotal field observations and label data. The present project aims to unravel the evolution of these enigmatic spiders in a large collaborative effort. We will combine the expertise of a team of ten people in five countries and apply state of the art methodology in three interconnected fields: systematics and evolution, biogeography, and evolutionary morphology and biology.