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.