Guarding by Males in the Opilionid Family Cranaidae

Abstract

One of the most abundant and common arthropod groups found in tropical forests is the harvestmen, which are potentially useful indicator species (Wade et al. 2011). Of the four suborders of Opiliones, Laniatores is the most diverse, with 26 families and 3,700 species, most of which are found in the Southern Hemisphere. One of these families is the large-bodied Cranaidae (Machado and Warfel 2006), which has a range extending from “the northern region of South America along the Andes and Amazon Basin up to Panama and Venezuela” (Pinto-da-Rocha and Kury 2003).