Bark spider (Caerostris Thorell, 1868, Araneidae Clerck, 1757) are large spiders distributed in the tropical regions of the Old World. Although this genus was understood until recently, it attracted more attention following the discovery of its species’ unique web evolution and biomaterial properties. Caerostris Characterized by web giantism that reaches the extremes of Darwin’s bark spiders (C. Darwini Kuntner & Agnarsson, 2010), employing the most strict known silk. For extraordinary silk C. Darwinia recent study provided whole-genome sequencing and Silk Jane mapping. C. Darwini And because of inexplicable diversity, sympatric homologues were misallocated C. Extract Butler, 1882. We describe cases of convergent evolution of somatic morphology that further hinders species identification in the field. Conduct morphological and molecular investigations of models that share “”C. Extract Morphology, we conclude that they belong to four different species. We re-represent two effective species, C. Extract and C. hirsuta (Simon, 1895) elevates what previously synonyms C. Bankana Strand, from species level until 1915, and new explanations C. Kuntneri sp. The species used in November to assemble its genome. I argue that this is an example of how global taxonomic disorders lead to errors in rapidly advancing fields such as genomics.
Gregorič, Matjaž, Kuang-Ping Yu, Winny Rojas Velez, and Jessica E. Garb. 2025. “The inexplicable diversity of Caerostris (Araneidae: Araneae) highlights the need for taxonomic expertise in the genomic age.” European Taxonomy 989(1):1–23. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2025.989.2877.
