Abstract
Libya is a vast expansion of a semi-arid desert of variable topography located in North Africa. It is bounded by Mediterranean Sea to the north, Tunisia and Algeria to the west, Egypt to the east, and Niger and Chad to the south. Libya covers 1,748,700 km². The strategic locations of Libya in North Africa and its unique landscape features including the geography, vegetation, and climate reflect the ecosystem diversity and biodiversity of this region of the world. Exploration of Libya dates back to the end of the 18th century, but data accumulation began only in the middle of the 19th century mainly by Italian, French, British and German explorers. The need for an updated list of spiders found in Libya rose recently due to upcoming planned studies. In this project, we list spider families from the Libyan Northwest coast, from existing literature and from 3335 spiders collected with different sampling methods after one year along the coast region from Jodyem (32° 47' 42" N 12° 49' 26" E) to Farwa Island (33° 6' 31" N 11° 44' 22" E) in 37 sites. Three thousand two hundred and eighty spiders were classified into 35 families, of which 2513 were females, and 767 were males. And 1834 were mature, 1446 immature. Air temperature, rainfall, and relative humidity were recorded during the four seasons of the year. The book revealed that the diversity of spider faunal density was high in spring and summer and low in fall and winter. The aim of this book is to the biodiversity, weather, and classification of the collected Libyan northwest spider fauna of the families: Gnaphosidae, Sicariidae, and Theridiidae to genus and species level. In addition, is to identify the venom spiders of health concern during 2013 – 2014.