Journal of Threatened Taxa | www.threatenedtaxa.org | 26 September 2019 | 11(12): 14630

Reply to response: spiders of Odisha

Sudhir Ranjan Choudhury ¹, Manju Siliwal ² & Sanjay Keshari Das ³

^1,3 University School of Environment Management, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Sector 16-C, Dwarka, New Delhi 110078, India.

² Wildlife Institute of India, Post Box #18, Chandrabani, Dehradun, Uttarakhand 248001, India.

¹ sudhirranjanchoudhury@gmail.com, ² manjusiliwal@gmail.com,

³ skdasipu@gmail.com (corresponding author)

doi: https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.5420.11.12.14630

Date of publication: 26 September 2019 (online & print)

Manuscript details: #5420 | Received 05 September 2019

Citation: Choudhury, S.R., M. Siliwal & S.K. Das (2019). Reply to response: spiders of Odisha. Journal of Threatened Taxa 11(12): 14630. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.5420.11.12.14630

Copyright: © Choudhury et al. 2019. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. JoTT allows unrestricted use, reproduction, and distribution of this article in any medium by adequate credit to the author(s) and the source of publication.

Comment: The authors declare that they prepared the checklist based on ‘published literature’, but seem to have omitted a few important ones. Omission of a few species may happen inadvertently due to many reasons, one being the unavailability of the concerned literature. But that is no excuse in this case, since all published literature is available and accessible from the World Spider Catalog (2019).

Reply: It was a huge and scattered data that is compiled in this checklist, many of them are local reporting which are till date not available in the World Spider Catalog.

Its welcome always to add to the list if it can’t be added during the compilation.

Comment: Having 77 unidentified species in the list may be considered an unnecessary addition, unless important morphological characters had been illustrated. On the other hand, species which have to be on the list have been ignored.

Reply: It is not at all unnecessary additions. In the present study we have 65 spiders identified up to the genus level only, of which many are either new report from India or new species that will be communicated separately with taxonomic details. Rest are reported by previous workers that cannot be ignored when we compile the checklist.

Comment Table 1:

Myrmaplata plataleoides (O.P.-Cambridge, 1869)

Nasoona orissa Tanasevitch, 2018

Reply: The first species already exists in the checklist.

The second species information was with us, but the paper was finalized and communicated before this species was discovered and we had in mind to include this in final checklist in future.

Moreover, our checklist was based on only one-year field survey data and is preliminary. The main aim was to compile the scattered data on spider fauna of this region. In future we will go for a detailed checklist.