Gasteracantha Clavatrix
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''Gasteracantha clavatrix'' is a species of spider of the genus '' Gasteracantha''. It occurs in Indonesia.


Distribution

''Gasteracantha clavatrix'' is known from
Sulawesi Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Ar ...
. Dahl reported a specimen from Lombok that he regarded as very similar, and World Spider Catalog also includes Mentawai Islands Regency in the species' range.


Description

Females of the species have six abdominal spines. The front and rear pairs are short and sharp; the middle spines are elongated and club-shaped, narrowing along their length and expanding at the end into a bulbous, hairy tip armed with a sharp conical point. These median spines are about as long as the abdomen is wide but may be slightly shorter or longer. The hard, shiny upper surface of the abdomen is white or yellow with dark sigilla and a black border along the anterior edge. In 1879,
O. Pickard-Cambridge Octavius Pickard-Cambridge FRS (3 November 1828 – 9 March 1917) was an English clergyman and zoologist. He was a keen arachnologist who described and named more than 900 species of spider. Life and work Pickard-Cambridge was born in Blox ...
described a specimen from Sulawesi that he named ''Gasteracantha claveata'' on the basis of its longer, more dramatically shaped median spines and its apparent lack of a black anterior band on the upper surface of the abdomen, though he also wrote that the color was "no doubt much faded by the drying of the specimen." Dahl wrote in 1914 that he believed the variation Pickard-Cambridge described was within the range of possible variation for the species and thus did not warrant species status, so Dahl synomized ''G. claveata'' with ''G. clavatrix''.


References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q2591980 clavatrix Spiders of Asia Spiders described in 1841