Pimoidae Explained

Pimoidae is a small family of araneomorph spiders first described by Jörg Wunderlich in 1986. As re-circumscribed in 2021, it is monophyletic, and contained around 90 species in two genera. It is closely related to the Linyphiidae, and is sometimes treated as synonymous with that family.

The species Pimoa cthulhu, described by Gustavo Hormiga in 1994, is named for Howard Phillips Lovecraft's mythological deity Cthulhu.

Distribution

The ancestors of the family are thought to have been widely distributed across the Palearctic, Nearctic and Sino-Japanese regions, but species now have a more fragmented distribution.

Genera

, this family includes two genera and 87 species:

• Nanoa Hormiga, Buckle & Scharff, 2005 – United States
• Pimoa Chamberlin & Ivie, 1943 – China, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Italy, Spain, France, North America

References

^{[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}

Notes and References

1. Web site: Family Pimoidae Wunderlich, 1986 . World Spider Catalog . 10.24436/2 . 2026-01-17.
2. Book: Wunderlich, J. . Spinnenfauna gestern und heute: Fossile Spinnen in Bernstein und ihre heute lebenden Verwandten . 1986.
3. Book: Murphy . J. A. . Spider families of the world and their spinnerets . Roberts . M. J. . British Arachnological Society . 2015 . 978-0950009377.
4. Hormiga. Gustavo. 1994. A Revision and Cladistic Analysis of the Spider Family Pimoidae (Araneoidea: Araneae). Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology. 549. 533–542.
5. Hormiga . Gustavo . Kulkarni . Siddharth . da Silva Moreira . Thiago . Dimitrov . Dimitar . amp . 2021 . Molecular phylogeny of pimoid spiders and the limits of Linyphiidae, with a reassessment of male palpal homologies (Araneae, Pimoidae) . Zootaxa . 5026 . 1 . 71–101 . 10.11646/zootaxa.5026.1.3 . 34810940 . 238681925.
6. Web site: Families . World Spider Catalog . Natural History Museum Bern . 2026-01-23 .