Four new species of the genus Pholcus Walckenaer (Araneae, Pholcidae) from Korea

Abstract

Pholcus Walckenaer, 1805 is the largest genus among the cellar spider family (Araneae, Pholcidae), including 339 species (World Spider Catalog, 2020), and a classification scheme as species-groups was suggested by Huber (2011). To date, 33 species in the genus are known to be distributed in Korea (World Spider Catalog, 2020), placed into three species-groups, viz, P. crypticolens-group (4 spp.), P. phalangioides-group (1 sp.) and P. phungifor mesgroup (28 spp.) (Huber, 2011; Wang et al., 2020). The endemic species diversity of Korean Pholcus species belonging to phungiformes-group was first noticed by Paik (1978), describing six new species. Later many indigenous species in this species-group were discovered by several arachnologists, contributing to the current species diversity of the species-group in Korea. Surprisingly, over the half of the species were found in the last decade (Huber, 2011; Seo, 2014; Kim and Ye, 2015; Kim and Kim, 2016; Seo, 2018). In this paper, we describe four new species belonging to phungiformes-group, with accompanying photographs: Pholcus chuncheonensis Lee, Choi and Kim sp. nov., Pholcus pajuensis Lee, Choi and Kim sp. nov., Pholcus pocheonensis Lee, Choi and Kim sp. nov., and Pholcus unaksanensis Lee, Choi and Kim sp. nov. Additionally, a key to these new species based on characteristics of copulatory organs is provided.