Jonathan Coddington - US grants

9712353 HORMIGA Spiders are numerous, widespread and have a direct impact on human affairs. About 30 species inflict medically important bites; more generally, spider venoms are used in medical and pharmaceutical research. Spider silk has extraordinary physical properties; silks and their constituents are foci of biotechnological research with possible commercial applications. Spiders also regulate insect populations in natural and agricultural environments. Nevertheless spider diversity and biology are inadequately understood. About 36,000 species are known to science, less than half of the number thought to be present on Earth. Faunas in tropical and Southern Hemisphere temperate areas are most poorly known. Even for the described species, accurate identification manuals, keys, monographs and phylogenetic analyses are, for the most part, lacking. In this PEET proposal, Gustavo Hormiga, John Coddington and colleagues will improve the state of spider taxonomy by conducting monographic research within three subfamilies (Linyphiidae; Theridiidae; Tetragnathidae) of araneoid (Araneae) spiders. The monographic research will make use of museum and field-collected specimens to describe new species, produce keys to species, reconstruct phylogenetic relationships among the species, and develop a computerized information system linking text, data, and image files and available via the World Wide Web and CD-ROM. The research will train three new taxonomists in modern methods, developed and applied to spiders, during the course of the project.

9707744 GILLESPIE Spiders are among the most diverse groups of organisms on earth, and are exceptional for their web-spinning abilities and diverse feeding strategies. Although a number of studies have examined relationships among spiders, one of the seven largest families, the comb-footed spiders (Theridiidae), remains an assemblage of poorly defined species. Besides being a large and abundant group, the Theridiidae exhibit a wide spectrum of unique ecological and behavioral attributes that make them unusually interesting. For example, some groups have developed the behavior of feeding exclusively on the webs of other species; others have elaborate web architectures; still others are social, living in large communal webs and sharing in the activities of capturing insects and tending the eggs and young. The family includes some well known and striking forms, such as the Hawaiian happy face spider and the notorious Black Widow. In this research, Rosemary Gillespie and Jonathan Coddington will make use of several different types of morphological and molecular characters to determine the phylogenetic relationships among comb-footed spiders, a previously difficult problem made more tractable by advances in phylogenetic analysis. The analysis will help the investigators determine how, and how often, the many shapes, sizes, colors, behaviors, ecological associations and venoms have appeared during the history of this spider family on Earth.

Abstract

Assembling the Tree of Life: Phylogeny of Spiders

Ward C. Wheeler, Jonathon A. Coddington, Gustavo Hormiga, Lorenzo Prendini, and Petra Sierewald

American Museum of natural History

A grant has been awarded to Dr. Ward Wheeler of the American Museum of Natural History and his colleagues Dr. Lorenzo Prendini (AMNH), Dr. Jonathan Coddington (National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution), Dr. Gustavo Hormiga (George Washington University) and Dr. Petra Sierwald (Field Museum of Natural History) to examine the evolutionary history and biodiversity of spiders. Spiders are among the oldest and most diverse groups of terrestrial organisms on our planet, with fossils dating back to the Devonian (c. 380 million years ago) and a current diversity of over 37,500 described species placed in 3,471 genera and 109 families. Spiders stand out because of their ecological importance as the dominant predators of insects. It is no exaggeration to say that without spiders, insect pest populations would soar and humans would be greatly affected. Furthermore, spiders are already model organisms in biochemical (silk proteins and venom), behavioral (especially sexual and web-building behaviors) and ecological (foraging, predator-prey systems, integrated pest management) research. Accordingly, understanding their evolutionary history is a critical component in the NSF's Assembling the Tree of Life program.
The aim of this Tree of Life proposal to produce a robust phylogeny of all the deepest branches within the spiders, by combining a massive amount of newly generated comparative genomic data with a substantial set of new and re-assessed data on morphology and behavior. The PIs will use high-throughput DNA sequencing to examine at least 50 "loci" for representatives of at least 500 genera of spiders and their closest relatives (the whipscorpions and allies). The computational challenges posed by the resulting large data matrices will be analyzed using new computer software, designed in large part by members of the group and using massively parallel processing to achieve supercomputing capability. These organisms included in the study will purposefully include all the previously most-favored study organisms of ethologists, ecologists, physiologists, and developmental and molecular biologists, thus integrating and contextualizing their research.

Scientific specimens, typically found in museum collections, serve as the anchor for an expanding array of information that grows and changes over time. This information, about specimens and the species that the specimens represent, is often scattered geographically across institutions and across independent computer systems, making it difficult to access or synthesize. The goal of this project is to develop a two-way system of linking and tracking scientific specimens and specimen-related data across biological collections, and to make this system widely available to the scientific community and the public. This system would employ globally unique identifiers, or GUIDs, to tag and update information associated with specimens, allowing communication between end users and collections. This project will improve data quality and quantity for non-scientists and scientists, and will actively engage use communities through training workshops, summer student internships, and community BioBlitz enhancements.

The ability to integrate specimen data and associated information across biological collections will enable critical studies related to systematics, biogeography, and changing species distributions. These in turn have implications for climate change, changing land use, and other questions key to understanding the past, placing changes in an historical context, and predicting the future of species and environments.