Response A preliminary but incomplete checklist of Gujarat spiders

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The authors of the paper Yadav et al. (2017) should be congratulated for taking up this herculean task of compilation and documentation of existing information about the spider fauna of Gujarat State.Additional data generated through fresh survey during 2014-15 have enriched the checklist and distribution records within the state.On careful reading of this paper, we found that there are certain mistakes in the paper and omissions of certain published information.We draw attention of the authors and readers here to rectify the errors and prepare a fresh checklist.
The authors claim that there are 415 species belonging to 169 genera of 40 families.Out of these, 29 genera and 17 families are endemic to Gujarat.There is, however, no mention of which species/genera/ family are endemic to Gujarat in the entire paper.If conclusions about endemism are correct, the authors have failed to highlight importance of Gujarat in spider species endemism.
The authors claim to have recorded 149 species belonging to 99 genera during their survey 0f 2014-15 but Table 3 shows that at least 45 species are identified only up to the genus level.When such species are added into the checklist, it is presumed that they could be a new species to science.
The authors have shown eight agro-climatic zones of Gujarat which have been adopted from the Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Government of Gujarat but the source for the same is not given.After looking at Map 1 and Table 1, one realizes that the zone numbers in the map and in the table do not match!Whether such a gross mistake is by the web site of Government of Gujarat or by the authors remains unknown.The zone names, sites covered and dominant flora shown in Table 1 appears to be of the authors and not of the Government website and hence it gives wrong information to the readers.The source of the content of Table 1 should have been mentioned clearly as the dominant flora and spider diversity shown here appears irrelevant.Evidences suggest that the authors are confused about the names of the agro-climatic zones (Table 1) and the numbers they have given on the map 1.According to the authors, 'The highest spider records were from the northwestern zone, which consists of Panchmahal and Vadodara…….'.According to the Table 1, the north-west zone is 8 where as Panchmahal and Vadodara falls under zone 3, middle Gujarat.The same mistake is repeated in Table 2 as most potential zone 2, 6 and 7 have very low numbers of species, which is not possible.
The Kachchh (Kutch) District -the second largest district of the country is climatically arid and located on the northwestern part of the state.Unfortunately, Kachchh District is not mentioned anywhere in Table 1.
All studies referred into this publication, except a few studies (Kumar & Shivakumar 2004;Trivedi 2009) were conducted in non-cultivated area.In spite of this, published records were classified into agro-climatic zones.Normally, occurrence/distribution of animal or plant species is viewed with respect to the biogeographic zones (Darlington 1980).

Omission of published information
In this paper, three unpublished Ph.D. Thesis of M.S.University of Baroda and one from Sardar Patel University are referred.The authors have not referred to the works carried out at other universities.The fact is that there are several Ph.D. Thesis submitted to M.K. Bhavnagar University (under the guidance of Dr. B.H. Patel & S.K. Patel), South Gujarat University and several