PhD Arthur Decae 2010 - Ghent Ecology - Universiteit Gent

Acknowledgements
Because this thesis consists of a series of papers that have already been published, or that are
submitted for publication, acknowledgements are provided separately with each paper or in
each chapter. The thesis could not have been written however without the help of others not
directly involved in the published material.
My special thanks go to Dr. Rudy Jocqué and the late Prof. Dr. Jean–Pierre Maelfait for their
warm enthusiasm, active help and provision of the conditions in which this project could
succeed. I furthermore thank Jean-Pierre for taking-up the position as my promotor and for
the valuable advice he gave me in the earlier stages of the work. I am also very grateful to
Prof. Dr. Dries Bonte for taking over the difficult task of being my promotor after the tragic
and much too early death of Jean-Pierre and to Prof. Dr. Luc Lens for his friendly help and
willingness to give me a place to work at the TEREC laboratories. I thank the members of the
promotion committees Prof. Dr. D. Bonte, Dr. R. Jocqué, Prof. Dr. F. Hendrickx, Prof. Dr. J.
Mertens, Dr. R. Bosmans and Dr. Jan Bosselaers for their enthusiasm to contribute to my
studies and I thank all my colleague PhD students for the friendly reception they provided me
at the TEREC laboratories. I thank the University of Gent for accepting me as a student and
for financing the expenses made in order to successfully carry out this thesis work. I am also
greatly indebted to many personal friends and family members for their mental support and
the constant interest they showed in the progression of my spider work. Finally I thank Nollie
Hallensleben, my wife and life’s companion for over forty years, for her help in preparing this
thesis.
A thesis usually marks the beginning of a scientific career and is therefore accompanied by a
curriculum vitae and a list of publications aimed to help the young doctor at a prospective
professional start. That is not the case here. This thesis is written at the end of a professional
career in which science did not play a central role, but was constantly present as a matter of
special interest and useful background to achieve all sorts of practical goals. The motivation
to nevertheless produce this thesis is that I hope to encourage interest in a branch of science
that, after a providential start in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, got bogged down in
its own confusion and the changing interests in the biological sciences. The study of
mygalomorph spiders started off in the Mediterranean where early savants of Natural History
such as J.T. Moggridge, E. Simon, A. Ausserer, O. Pickard-Cambridge, T. Thorell and others
carried out their pioneering research. Their work, building a solid taxonomic basis for
understanding mygalomorph spider diversity in the Mediterranean Region, unfortunately has
never been satisfactorily finished. When in the course of the twentieth century the focus of
biological science shifted from classical Systematics and Taxonomy to more predictive and
process orientated studies, attention for biological description faded and no further progress
was made in the knowledge of the Mediterranean mygalomorph spider fauna. In the
awakening of modern biodiversity studies however, there is a renewed interest in questions of
species identity and identification. Knowledge about how many species there are and which
species occurs where is important again. Due to the unfinished taxonomical work these
questions, when asked in relation to Mediterranean mygalomorph spiders, are very difficult to
answer. Nevertheless, these questions are now asked by a number of young researchers that
live and work in countries bordering the Mediterranean or that are located in the
Mediterranean climate zone. As an older arachnologist I hope to be able to act as a mediator
between the generations providing helpful background information for new studies in
Phylogenetics and Phylogeography. This thesis is therefore dedicated to all these young
researchers whose names feature in the acknowledgements of the here collected papers.
1