What is the problem/issue being addressed?
HIDDENLIFE project aims to improve our understanding of one of the top biodiversity hotspots in Europe–the Dinarides, and its unique cave fauna, to ensure its conservation and future well-being. Through a multidisciplinary approach that combines state of the art molecular and statistical tools, I investigated the systematics, phylogeography, and environmental preferences of three independent lineages of cave spiders. This will contribute to understanding the mechanisms that shaped their origin and present-day diversity and distribution. By projecting potential distributions under predicted scenarios of global warming, I predicted future habitat suitability and assessed the vulnerability of this unique and fragile fauna.
Why is it important for society?
Climate warming and other anthropogenic perturbations are affecting ecosystems worldwide, contributing to the sixth mass extinction. Documenting and explaining vanishing biodiversity are major challenges today. Understanding biodiversity is an essential step towards halting its loss and in preventing the degradation of ecosystem services. Caves are isolated and extreme habitats. Their stable climatic conditions, scarcity of food and absence of light drive the evolution of highly adapted fauna. Despite their stable climatic conditions, recent studies show that global warming may impact subterranean habitats by rising temperatures and, consequently, threatening troglobionts (animals adapted to caves life), which have a low tolerance to temperature variations, causing the reduction of optimal habitat and driving narrowly distributed species to extinction.
Through the HIDDENLIFE project I discovered 41 new species, most of them indistinguishable by morphology, I evaluated sensitivity to climatic changes for all the species and identified regions with high species richness – hotspots within a hotspot. All of this is prerequisite for sustainable management and protection of this species and areas with high biodiversity.
What are the overall objectives?
Several objectives have been set at the beginning of this action:
1. To infer the phylogenies of three independent lineages Dinaric of cave spiders, families Dysderidae and Leptonetidae and genus Troglohyphantes, to estimate divergence times and to identify drivers of cave diversification.
2. To delimit species, describe new species and to reveal population structure of studied groups.
3. To infer past, present and future potential distributions of cave spider species and to evaluate their sensitivity of to global warming, especially of endangered ones.
Conclusions of the action
- inferred phylogenies of the three groups of cave-dwelling spiders in the Dinarides are an essential tool for conducting comparative analyses to identify the main drivers of diversification
- most of the cave-adapted lineages are of Miocene origin (23 to 5 million years ago) and most diversification events happened in Pleistocene (2.5 million years ago) supporting the hypothesis that the onset of seasonality and glacial cycles are one of the main drivers of cave diversification
- number of species of all three groups is almost double what was known before, confirming Dinarides as a World’s hotspot for cave fauna
- in the case of predicted climate warming scenario almost all species will suffer geographical shift in suitable habitat, and given low mobility of these species and fragmentation of karst systems it is highly improbable that they will be able to move and colonize new areas
- in the case of highest predicted temperature increase, several species will completely lose suitable habitats, probably causing their extinction
