Ninetis samail, Huber & Meng, 2025

Huber, Bernhard A. & Meng, Guanliang, 2025, Like grains of sand: Ninetis spiders on the Arabian Peninsula (Araneae: Pholcidae), Zootaxa 5563 (1), pp. 290-335 : 332

Ninetinae genera on the Arabian Peninsula

Until 2019, Ninetis was the only genus of Ninetinae known from the Old World. In 2019, the genus Magana was newly described for a single species from Oman, M. velox . It was “not assigned to Ninetis because all previously described representatives of Ninetis are very uniform morphologically despite their wide geographic range (from Namibia to the Arabian Peninsula), while Magana velox differs in several aspects” ( Huber & Carvalho 2019: 39). Following this reasoning, the two new Omani species described herein ( N. samail sp. nov., N. marnif sp. nov.) would also seem to justify the creation of new genera. Molecular (UCE) data (G. Meng, D. Dimitrov, B.A. Huber, L. Podsiadlowski, unpublished data) place them together as sister to N. subtilissima , i.e. closer than Magana velox (no other representatives of Ninetis are included in that dataset). We prefer a conservative approach here even if this means that Ninetis becomes more difficult to diagnose. Based on morphological similarity, we predict that molecular data will place Ninetis subtilissima closer to African and Malagasy representatives of Ninetis than to N. samail sp. nov. and N. marnif sp. nov. As long as Magana velox is resolved as sister to this entire clade, the creation of new genera for N. samail sp. nov. and N. marnif sp. nov. (or of one genus in case that the two species are sister taxa) will remain a subjective decision.

Current knowledge suggests that Oman is a center of Old World Ninetinae diversity. The three Omani endemics, i.e. N. samail sp. nov., N. marnif sp. nov., and Magana velox include more morphological diversity than all other Old World Ninetinae together. This is in remarkable contrast to southwestern Saudi Arabia, which is generally considered as one of the richest biodiversity areas on the Arabian Peninsula ( Abuzinada et al. 2005; Al-Namazi et al. 2021): only the widely distributed Ninetis amoud sp. nov. was found in this region, and this species is morphologically similar to N. subtilissima and to African and Malagasy congeners.