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Nina created and continues to expand an online visual reference gallery that helps museum curators identify some of the most difficult spiders in North America – the minute female Linyphiidae.
Nina's spider work at the Field Museum started in 1998, with identifying collection specimens in the Nearctic backlog and updating the taxonomic and biogeographic organization of the material. She worked on the Swallow Cliff diversity study, helped compile the Midwest spider list, and reorganized the museum's holdings of the six-eyed goblin spiders (family Oonopidae) in preparation for a Planetary Biodiversity Inventory grant.
After encountering many specimens of the tiny and poorly known sheet web weavers (family Linyphiidae), she began focusing on ways to aid identification of this group, particularly the dwarf spiders (subfamily Erigoninae sensu lato). Since 2007, she has been compiling the LinEpig visual reference gallery, one of the very few identification tools available for female erigonines, which are the only spiders in North America without a key to the genus level. This post in the Scientific American blog describes her work.
Nina Sandlin
Spiders - Zoology
Field Museum
1400 S. Lake Shore Dr.
Chicago, Illinois 60605 USA
LinEpig gallery
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