About this tool

Taxa included

Most of the taxa were included in the tool based on published species lists for spiders found in grapes in California’s Central Valley, mostly generated by the work of Costello and Daane (1995, 1997, 1998, 2003). Their work includes sampling from various types of grapes including raisin and table grapes. They collected about 50,000 specimens over more than a decade, constituting about 35 species.

In the key, we have included all species that are likely to be found in grapes. Species that are rare or might mistakenly travel into a vineyard and be collected are excluded from the key, but fact sheets have been provided so identification may still be possible. Collections in the literature included sampling from the leaf canopy and on the vines themselves, as well as in the grape clusters. Additional collections were made during the course of developing this identification tool in order to obtain DNA sequences for almost all of the species.