Oreobolus

[John Grehan]

Ken Kinman

At 11:36 PM 7/5/02 +0000, you wrote:
>  (and the dispersal ability of ballooning spiders must
>also reduce the value of biogeography for them).

One could see if spiders in general conform or not to the biogeographic
patterns of life in general.

>P.S.  And now that I have run out of speculative possibilities on Oreobolus,
>I will start looking for some of that "empirical evidence" of a southern
>origin and trans-Antarctic dispersal.  Will begin with Seberg's analysis and
>go from there.   By the way, anybody know what genus might be sister group
>to Oreobolus?

According to Seberg (1988), if his phylogeny is to be believed, the sister
genus is Schoenoides which is confined to Tasmania. After that it the next
group appears to comprise a cluster of species in Costularia subgenus
Costularia. I'm not sure of the details but the distribution of this group
includes Africa and east Asia. I'll have to look for more detail (or
hopefully someone knows already).

John Grehan