E4: New Species— of Happy Face spiders in Hawaii!

Our guest for this episode, Dr. Rosemary Gillespie, is a professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, professor in the Division of Insect Biology, and Director of the Essig Museum of Entomology at the University of California - Berkeley. She talks to us about her paper that will be published in the next issue of Invertebrate Systematics wherein she and her coauthors describe eight new species of Happy Face spiders from Hawaii.

We talk about why these spiders are called Happy Face spiders, how they got to Hawaii, and why they are important in the Hawaiian ecosystem.

The title of the paper is “A happy family: systematic revision of the endemic Theridion spiders of the Hawaiian Islands” The paper is available free as Open Access through the month of February at https://www.publish.csiro.au/IS/IS20001 . To learn more about Dr. Gillespie, follow her on Twitter @Berkeley_Evolab or Instagram berkeley.evolab, or find her at https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/rosemary-g-gillespie .

Follow first author on the paper, Adrià Bellvert, on Twitter @AdriaBellvert, or follow the senior author, Dr. Miquel Arnedo, on Twitter @MiquelArnedo. You can also follow Dr. Arnedo’s lab on Twitter @spidersysevo.