| Comments |
P.6 bottom paragraph: "A Brief Introduction to Spiders: Spiders (Araneae) belong to the class Arachnida together with 10 other orders: scorpions (Scorpiones), harvestmen (Opiliones), pseudoscorpions (Pseudoscorpiones), windscorpions (Solifugae), mites and ticks (“Acari”), micro-whip scorpions (Palpigradi), hooded tickspiders (Ricinulei), tailless whipscorpions (Amblypygi), and shorttailed whipscorpions (Schizomida) and whipscorpions (Uropygi)—common names based on Breene et al. (2003). All spiders are hypothesized to have descended from a common ancestor (i.e., they represent a monophyletic group, Garrison et al., 2016, Wheeler et al., 2016) and the group encompasses nearly 47,000 extant species, distributed among 4,072 genera and 112 families (primary source). They are considered to be one of the most successful groups of organism in terms of their long evolutionary history and diverse ecological impacts—they are distributed in virtually all terrestrial ecosystems and play a key role as generalist carnivorous predators (Turnbull, 1973, Foelix, 2011). Indeed, a recent study by Nyffeler & Birkhofer (2017) estimated that the global spider community consumes between 400 and 800 million tons of prey annually." |