Checklist of the Spiders (Araneae) of British Columbia March 2020 Robb Bennett1,2, David Blades2, Gergin Blagoev3, Don Buckle4, Claudia Copley2, Darren Copley2, Charles Dondale5, and Rick C. West6 1Corresponding author –
[email protected] 2Natural History Section, Royal British Columbia Museum, 675 Belleville St, Victoria, BC, Canada 3Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada 416-3415 Calder Crescent, Saskatoon, SK, Canada 5Canadian National Collection, Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada, 960 Carling Ave, Ottawa, ON, Canada (retired) 66365 Willowpark Way, Sooke, BC, Canada A female Dolomedes triton (Walckenaer) feeding on a stickleback and a male Rhomphaea fictilium (Hentz) lurking on an orchard grass seed head. These two spider species are locally common in British Columbia but not often encountered by casual observers. Images credit: Sean McCann. Abstract: In 2006, the Royal British Columbia Museum began systematically documenting the full diversity of British Columbia’s spider fauna. Initially, museum specimens and literature records were used to update an existing checklist and identify poorly sampled habitats in BC. Annual field surveys of spiders, primarily targeting alpine and subalpine habitats, began in 2008; barcode identification of previously unidentifiable specimens commenced in 2012. These efforts have resulted in significant increases in the area of BC that has been sampled for spiders, the number of species documented in the BC checklist, and the number of specimens in the RBCM collection. Many of the additions to the checklist represent the first Canadian or Nearctic records of those taxa or are undescribed species. By early 2020, data from nearly 42 000 spider specimens had been entered into the RBCM database.