Chibchea Huber, 2000

Huber, Bernhard A. & Carvalho, Leonardo S., 2019, Filling the gaps: descriptions of unnamed species included in the latest molecular phylogeny of Pholcidae (Araneae), Zootaxa 4546 (1), pp. 1-96 : 43

Chibchea Huber, 2000

Chibchea Huber, 2000: 162 ; type species by original designation: Chibchea ika Huber, 2000 .

Notes. The three new species below fit the original diagnosis of the genus ( Huber 2000). The modified male cheliceral fangs seem to be a unique synapomorphy that unites the type species from Colombia with several other species from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina ( Huber 2000). The new species share this modification and are thus likely close relatives of the type species. They are particularly similar in several respects to the Colombian C. valle Huber, 2000 , a species that is only known from the male holotype.

Apart from two of the three species newly described below, the recent molecular phylogeny of Pholcidae ( Eberle et al. 2018) included only two Chilean species of Chibchea that were tentatively identified as C. mapuche Huber, 2000 and C. picunche Huber, 2000 . Both lack modifications of the male cheliceral fangs, and they were thus explicitly assigned tentatively to the genus in Huber (2000). The molecular phylogeny does not recover a close relationship between these Chilean species and the species newly described below, suggesting that Chibchea in its current scope is polyphyletic. In an ongoing molecular study (L.S. Carvalho et al., unpubl. data), the three new species described below form a monophyletic group with two undescribed Andean species that also have modified male cheliceral fangs (“L17-168” from Loreto, Peru; and “L17-230” from La Paz, Bolivia), further supporting the conclusion that this clade represents ‘true’ Chibchea even though we have no molecular data from the type species.

The recent molecular phylogeny of Pholcidae ( Eberle et al. 2018) places the genus in a very basal position among Modisiminae but support values for these basal nodes are very low and the sister group of Chibchea is therefore essentially unknown.

The genus was originally thought to have an Andean distribution ( Huber 2000). The three new species below extend the distribution to include large parts of the Amazon basin.