An inventory of the spider fauna was carried out at Serra do Cachimbo, inside the "Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso", municipality of Novo Progresso, state of Pará, Brazil. Two expeditions were made, during both dry (August and September, 2003) and wet (March and April, 2004) seasons. Three collectors participated in each expedition. The sampling effort, represented by 240 samples, was divided into the following methods: beating tray and sweeping net (96 samples); nocturnal hand search (96 samples) and concentrated litter sorted by a combination of hand search and Winkler extractors (48 samples). The spiders assemblages from four vegetation types (open rainforest, riparian forest, arboreal savanna and white sand vegetation) were compared. A total of 4,990 spiders were obtained, from which 2,750 adults, resulting in 427 morphospecies of 37 families. The most abundant families were Theridiidae, Salticidae, and Araneidae and the ones with more species were Salticidae, Araneidae, and Theridiidae. Singletons represented 40% of the total species richness and only two species presented more than 100 individuals. The estimated species richness curve produced by ACE reached 614 species. The highest alpha-diversity (Shannon-Wiener index) was observed in open rainforest, followed by riparian forest, white sand vegetation and arboreal savanna. These differences among the various vegetations can be explained by variations in vegetation complexity and micro-habitat availability in each vegetation type.
Spiders; species richness; richness estimate; Brazilian Amazonia
