• Corpus ID: 209504706

TAXONOMIC AND MOLECULAR STUDY OF THE WIDOW SPIDER GENUS LATRODECTUS WALCKENAER, 1805 (ARANEAE: THERIDIIDAE) IN IRAQ

@inproceedings{Ali2018TAXONOMICAM,
  title={TAXONOMIC AND MOLECULAR STUDY OF THE WIDOW SPIDER GENUS LATRODECTUS WALCKENAER, 1805 (ARANEAE: THERIDIIDAE) IN IRAQ},
  author={Hayder Ali and Hula Y. Fadhil and Ishraq Mohammed Baker},
  year={2018}
}

• H. Ali, H. Fadhil, I. Baker
• Published 2018
• Biology

The genus Latrodectus Walckenaer, 1805 (Araneae: Theridiidae) is a worldwide distribute genus (Graudins et al., 2001), it includes a group of species commonly referred to as widow spiders. It's considered a taxonomically complex genus as the status of several forms had not been properly evaluated and specific boundaries are not well defined or understood (Levi, 1959; 1967; Garb et al., 2001), therefore, in multiple cases, populations has been uncritically referred to as different taxa. Discriminating between Latrodectus species using morphology has always been problematic (Levi, 1983), it is difficult taxonomically and readily separated from members of other Theridiid genera (Mirshamsi, 2005).The Genus Asagena Sundevall, 1833 was revalidated by Wunderlich (2008), this genus was earlier considered as a junior synonym of Steatoda Sundevall, 1833. The information and knowledge about the widow spiders in Iraq are very limited; in general spider in Iraq was neglected and rarely studied until the last few years, recently the interest in studying of this group was increased because of the emergence of several cases of bites, which was supposed to be caused by black widow spiders, researchers have revealed the existence of three Latrodectus species in Iraq, L. scelio (Abdul-Rassoul et al., 2012), L. hasselti (Al-Hadlag and Najim, 2015), while Zamani and El-Hennawy (2016) rejected these two species from the list of Iraqi spiders fauna and attributed them to L. renivulvatus. The difficulties of diagnosis underlines the importance of molecular characters in creating a valid phylogeny for this genus, this study characterizes the first phylogenetic relationship to the Latrodectus genus in Iraq and is made by sequence of the partial mt DNA-COI gene. The aim of the present study is to provide a taxonomic status of the widow spider species based on molecular analysis for the first time in Iraq.