About Us
Our Team
This morphospecies guide has been made by past and present members of the Avilés lab at the Univeristy of British Columbia (UBC).
Jessica Schmidt created this website and assigned the morphospecies for this project. She used to work as a laboratory technician for the Avilés lab and is currently in Belize studying water mites.
Yi Lin Zhou assisted with field work collecting and describing the spiders in this guide. She is starting her Masters degree at Harvard in September.
Andrea Haberkern is the project lead for several papers using the data collected for this website. Andrea is currently working on a PhD on spider web architecture at UBC.
Dr. Leticia Avilés is the principal investigator of the Avilés lab. Her research centres around social spider ecology. Dr. Wayne Maddison studies jumping spider taxonomy.
Dr. Antonio Brescovit and Dr. Dana De Roche collaborated with the Avilés lab to assist in taxonomic identification.
The Morphospecies Guide
The guide is a tool for anyone interested in learning about the incredible diversity of Ecuadorian spiders. It is organized onto pages based on taxonomy, with descriptions and pictures for each unique kind of spider. All the data used for this project are available for download.
Our Field Methods
We collected spiders at sites along an Ecuadorian elevational gradient, from the Amazon Basin to the Andean cloud forests to the Andean paramo at 4000 m.a.s.l. We sampled a variety of sites using transect methodology (described in the below field work protocol).
Spiders were exported to the University of British Columbia for measuring and morphospecies assignments (described in the below morphospecies protocol). They were then exported to either a) the Instituto Butantan in Sao Paulo, Brazil, or b) the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, USA. This was for professional taxonomic identification from our collaborators.
Locations
Data were collected across ten locations.
These locations spanned an elevational band in Ecuador:
Estación Biológica Yasuní | 250masl | Lowland Rainforest |
Reserva de Producción de Fauna Cuyabeno | 400masl | Lowland Rainforest |
Jatun Sacha Biological Station | 400masl | Lowland Rainforest |
Reserva Biologica del Rio Bigal | 900masl | Foothill Rainforest |
Narupa Reserve of Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco | 1100masl | Foothill Rainforest |
Concierto de Aves in San Francisco de Borja | 1700masl | Cloud Forest |
San Jorge Guacamayos Wildlife Reserve in Cocodrilos | 1800masl | Cloud Forest |
Yanayacu Biological Station | 2100masl | Cloud Forest |
Reserva Ecológica Cayambe Coca, near Cuyuja | 2700masl | Cloud Forest |
Reserva Ecológica Cayambe Coca, near Papallacta | 3500masl | Páramo |
Permits
Spiders for this project were collected under permits issued by the Ministerio del Ambiente in Ecuador:
2017: N˚ 007-17 IC-FAU-DNB/MA; 2018: N˚ 011-018-IC-FLO-DPAN/MA; 2019: N°017-19 IC-FAU-DNB/MA