We present a new hypothesis of relationships among erigonine spiders based mainly on morphological characters. We have added taxa and characters to a previous analysis of erigonine relationships by Hormiga (2000). Hormiga encoded 43 taxa including 31 erigonines for 67 informative characters. We have added new erigonine taxa and informative characters, approximately doubling the dimensions of the matrix. Most of the characters in Hormiga's analysis are included, sometimes in modified form. Nearly all of the taxa added for the current analysis represent Neotropical genera. Our phylogeny has implications for hypotheses of character evolution in erigonines. We evaluate progress in our effort to understand erigonine phylogeny using a new method, Continuous Jackknife Function analysis (Miller, in prep.). Continuous Jackknife Function analysis uses character removal and a reference hypothesis to evaluate the stability of the hypothesis under test. The results are presented as a graph of the number of clades recovered after character removal and reanalysis against the percent probability of character removal. Stable phylogenies are expected to take the form of a decreasing asymptotic curve with a high rate of clade recovery.
Species 1: Araneae Linyphiidae
Keywords: phylogeny, stability
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