Abstract

DESALES-LARA, Marco Antonio; FRANCKE, Oscar F.  and  SANCHEZ-NAVA, Petra. Diversity of spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) in anthropogenic habitats. Rev. Mex. Biodiv. [online]. 2013, vol.84, n.1, pp.291-305. ISSN 2007-8706.  https://doi.org/10.7550/rmb.31708.

City-building is the most drastic, fundamental and irreversible transformation of natural environments, replacing all original biotic and abiotic components of the site. Spiders are among the arthropods that have become adapted to urban environments. We found 41 species within 12 two-story houses of the city of Toluca, located in 4 environments with different degrees of urbanization, during the period September 2009-August 2010. For the first time a systematic method was used to collect spiders inside houses with even collecting efforts. The diversity of spiders is different in each of the sampled environments, the Shannon index (H ') indicated that the diversity of spiders was higher in houses with gardens in the urban environment, so it does not support the hypothesis of intermediate disturbance. The number of spiders found is higher on the first level of houses than on the second, and 3 hypotheses are proposed to explain this difference. The Olmstead-Tukey test is proposed to determine the 4 levels of synanthropism (N. S.), since the test includes values used in the density and infestation rates (occupation).

Keywords : degree of urbanization; synanthropism; ecology; urban environments.

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