Shlomi Aharon

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | bgu · Department of Life Sciences

While pessimism dominates discussions on biodiversity loss, it is increasingly recognized that for the long-term success of conservation programs, we also need hope. One way to foster hope is to celebrate the positive outcomes of conservation efforts. Here, we report on a successful step in the conservation efforts of Ayyalon cave, a unique subterr...

Caves have long been recognized as a window into the mechanisms of diversification and convergent evolution, due to the unique conditions of isolation and life in the dark. These lead to adaptations and reduce dispersal and gene flow, resulting in high levels of speciation and endemism. The Israeli cave arachnofauna remains poorly known, but likely...

Caves constitute ideal study systems for investigating adaptation and speciation, as the abiotic conditions shared by aphotic habitats exert a set of environmental filters on their communities. Arachnids constitute an important component of many cave ecosystems worldwide. We investigated the population genomics of two whip spider species: Sarax ioa...

Scorpions constitute a charismatic lineage of arthropods and comprise more than 2500 described species. Found throughout various tropical and temperate habitats, these predatory arachnids have a long evolutionary history, with a fossil record that began in the Silurian. While all scorpions are venomous, the asymmetrically diverse family Buthidae ha...

Deserts are characterized by unpredictable precipitation and extreme temperatures. Their fauna and flora are sensitive to anthropogenic environmental changes, and often recover slowly from environmental disasters. The effects of oil spills on the biota of desert regions, however, have scarcely been studied. We predicted that terrestrial invertebrat...

Caves possess a continuum of ecological zones that differ in their microhabitat conditions, resulting in a gradient of nutrients, climate, and illumination. These conditions engender relatively rapid speciation and diverse assemblages of highly specialised spider fauna. It is unclear, however, how zonation of these caves affects spider assemblage c...

Caves share unique conditions that have led to convergent adaptations of cave-dwelling animals. In addition, local factors act as filters on regional species-pools to shape the assemblage composition of local caves. Surveys of 35 Levantine caves, distributed along a climate gradient from the mesic in the north of Israel to hyper-arid areas in the s...

Long-branch attraction is a systematic artifact that results in erroneous groupings of fast-evolving taxa. The combination of short, deep internodes in tandem with LBA artifacts has produced empirically intractable parts of the Tree of Life. One such group is the arthropod subphylum Chelicerata, whose backbone phylogeny has remained unstable despit...

Background Arachnids are important components of cave ecosystems and display many examples of troglomorphisms, such as blindness, depigmentation, and elongate appendages. Little is known about how the eyes of arachnids are specified genetically, let alone the mechanisms for eye reduction and loss in troglomorphic arachnids. Additionally, duplicatio...

Long-branch attraction is a systematic artifact that results in erroneous groupings of fast-evolving taxa. The combination of short, deep internodes in tandem with LBA artifacts has produced empirically intractable parts of the Tree of Life. One such group is the arthropod subphylum Chelicerata, whose backbone phylogeny has remained unstable despit...

Scorpions constitute a charismatic lineage of arthropods and comprise more than 2,500 described species. Found throughout various tropical and temperate habitats, these predatory arachnids have a long evolutionary history, with a fossil record that began in the Silurian. While all scorpions are venomous, the asymmetrically diverse family Buthidae h...

Arachnids are important components of cave ecosystems and display many examples of troglomorphisms, such as blindness, depigmentation, and elongate appendages. Little is known about how the eyes of arachnids are specified genetically, let alone the mechanisms for eye reduction and loss in troglomorphic arachnids. Additionally, paralogy of Retinal D...

After tumultuous revisions to the family-level systematics of Laniatores (the armored harvestmen), the basally branching family Phalangodidae presently bears a disjunct and irregular distribution, attributed to the fragmentation of Pangea. One of the curious lineages assigned to Phalangodidae is the monotypic Israeli genus Haasus, the only Laniator...

Caves are excellent model systems to study the effects of abiotic factors on species distributions due to their selective conditions. Different ecological factors have been shown to affect species distribution depending on the scale of analysis, whether regional or local. The interplay between local and regional factors in explaining the spatial di...

Recent environmental processes are studied in ʻA’rak Naʻasane Cave at the northern Judean Desert, Israel. The outer zone of the cave is heavily influenced by the outside environment through a large entrance, facilitating entry of air flow, fauna and humans, with minor cave-forming modifications. Conversely, the inner cave sustains humid and warm co...

This is the first revision of Artema Walckenaer, 1837, a genus consisting of large and phylogenetically interesting species. Even though Artema is not species-rich (now eight nominal species), it has suffered from poor descriptions and synonymies. Our main goal was to gather all available material and to clarify species limits. Four species are eas...

A new species of Charinus is described from Israel and new localities for C. ioanniticus are reported. Charinus israelensis sp. nov. is a cave dwelling species with extremely small median eyes, no median tubercle and reduced lateral eyes. It is similar to C. ioanniticus, which occurs in nearby areas, but can be differentiated by the shape of the ca...

Leptonetidae and Phyxelididae were discovered as part of the first thorough cave survey of arthropods in Israel, and are reported here for the first time from caves in Israel. Both families were found in relatively temperate and humid caves at the western part of Israel and in intermediate elevation, at the cave entrance and the twilight zone. Lept...

1.Natal dispersal is a successful tactic under a range of conditions in spite of significant costs. Habitat quality is a frequent proximate cause of dispersal, and studies have shown that dispersal increases both when natal habitat quality is good or poor. In social species kin competition, favoring dispersal, may be balanced by the benefits of gro...