Thelcticopis Karsch, 1884

Fomichev, Alexander A. & Omelko, Mikhail M., 2024, A survey of the Sumatran Sparassidae (Araneae). 1. Two new Thelcticopis species, Zootaxa 5537 (3), pp. 348-356 : 349

Genus Thelcticopis Karsch, 1884

Thelcticopis Karsch, 1884 , comprising 53 species, is a medium-sized genus of Sparassidae , distributed from Korea in the Northeast and India in the West to Papua New Guinea ( WSC 2024). Recently, this genus of huntsman spiders has attracted the attention of arachnologists. Several species were described from Vietnam, Laos, Philippines and the tropical part of China ( Barrion & Litsinger 1995; Jäger & Praxaysombath 2009; Liu et al. 2010; Logunov & Jäger 2015; Zhu et al. 2020; Cai et al. 2021). The Hindustanian and Burmese species were revised by Sankaran et al. (2024). Despite this, Thelcticopis is still a poorly studied genus. Most of the species inhabiting islands of the Indo-Malayan realm have not been redescribed or reported since their original descriptions. Almost ¾ of the described species (39) are known only from a single sex ( WSC 2024). Thelcticopis species are usually medium- to large-sized nocturnal spiders inhabiting low vegetation, tree bark, and leaf litter in forests ( Cai et al. 2021; Ng et al. 2022). Some representatives of the genus, such as T. orichalcea ( Simon, 1880) , have a striking appearance and impressively aggressive behavior ( Ng et al. 2022). Thelcticopis has a slight medical significance, as its bites are moderately dangerous to humans ( Ismail et al. 2019).