Belisana Thorell, 1898

Huber, Bernhard A., 2019, The pholcid spiders of Sri Lanka (Araneae: Pholcidae), Zootaxa 4550 (1), pp. 1-57 : 2

Belisana Thorell, 1898

Belisana Thorell, 1898: 278 . Type species: B. tauricornis Thorell, 1898 ( Myanmar) .

Belisana — Simon 1903: 988. Simon 1909: 81. Deeleman-Reinhold 1986: 46, fig. 5. Huber 2001: 124. Huber 2005: 12.

Notes. With now 115 species, Belisana is the second most species rich genus in Pholcidae ( World Spider Catalog 2018) . It is highly diverse in Southeast Asia, but ranges from India and Sri Lanka in the west to Japan and Fiji in the east (Huber 2005). Morphology and molecular data suggest that the isolated African ‘ Spermophora ’ kyambura Huber & Warui, 2012 may also belong to Belisana ( Eberle et al. 2018; Huber et al. 2018).

Two distinct ‘ecomorphs’ (in the original sense of Williams 1972: 82) occur within the genus, often at a single locality (Huber 2005): long-legged pale whitish to greenish spiders associated with live leaves where they build irregular or highly regular domed sheet webs with the apex in contact with the underside of the leaf; and shortlegged brownish spiders in the leaf litter, with tiny webs and possibly sometimes without webs. Molecular data suggest that there have been several shifts between live leaves and leaf litter within Belisana ( Eberle et al. 2018) . Five of the six known Sri Lankan species (all treated below) belong to the long-legged ecomorph; the newly described B. minneriya sp. n. is the first Sri Lankan representative of the short-legged ecomorph.