Abstract
Although species delimitation can be highly contentious, the development
of reliable methods to accurately ascertain species boundaries is an
imperative step in cataloguing and describing Earth’s quickly
disappearing biodiversity. Spider species delimitation remains largely
based on morphological characters; however, many mygalomorph spider
populations are morphologically indistinguishable from each other yet
have considerable molecular divergence. The focus of our study,
Antrodiaetus unicolor species complex which contains two sympatric
species, exhibits this pattern of relative morphological stasis with
considerable genetic divergence across its distribution. A past study
using two molecular markers, COI and 28S, revealed that A. unicolor is
paraphyletic with respect to A. microunicolor. To better investigate
species boundaries in the complex, we implement the cohesion species
concept and employ multiple lines of evidence for testing genetic
exchangeability and ecological interchangeability. Our integrative
approach includes extensively sampling homologous loci across the genome
using a RADseq approach (3RAD), assessing population structure across
their geographic range using multiple genetic clustering analyses that
include STRUCTURE, PCA, and a recently developed unsupervised machine
learning approach (Variational Autoencoder). We evaluate ecological
similarity by using large-scale ecological data for niche-based
distribution modeling. Based on our analyses, we conclude that this
complex has at least one additional species as well as confirm species
delimitations based on previous less comprehensive approaches. Our study
demonstrates the efficacy of genomic-scale data for recognizing cryptic
species, suggesting that species delimitation with one data type,
whether one mitochondrial gene or morphology, may underestimate true
species diversity in morphologically homogenous taxa with low vagility.