Tissahamia Huber, 2018

Huber, Bernhard A., 2019, The pholcid spiders of Sri Lanka (Araneae: Pholcidae), Zootaxa 4550 (1), pp. 1-57 : 25

Tissahamia Huber, 2018

Pholcus ethagala group: Huber 2011: 171. Huber et al. 2016a: 4.

Tissahamia Huber, 2018 in Huber et al. 2018: 86 . Type species: Pholcus ethagala Huber, 2011 ( Sri Lanka).

Notes. The genus Tissahamia was recently created for eleven species from Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia, all of which had originally been described in Pholcus ( Huber et al. 2018) . The genus consists of two sub-groups: a Sri Lankan group and a Southeast Asian group. Several morphological similarities join the two groups ( Huber 2011), but ecologically they differ dramatically: all Sri Lankan representatives are leaf-dwellers; all Southeast Asian species are litter-dwellers ( Huber et al. 2016a). Molecular data were ambiguous as to the monophyly of the genus ( Eberle et al. 2018) but both groups were consistently most closely related to two other Southeast Asian genera ( Teranga Huber, 2018 and Panjange Deeleman-Reinhold & Deeleman, 1983 ).

The ZMUT has a female specimen from India, Kerala [Ernakulam Angamaly, Desom, 10.13°N, 76.35°E, AA 3636] that reminds of the four Sri Lankan species, suggesting that the Sri Lankan clade of the genus may in fact be a Western Ghats-Sri Lankan endemic group.