Spiders from Some Pacific Islands, Part IV 
The Cook Islands and Niue 
B. J. Marples 1 
The Cook Islands are a group of small islands 
in the region of the central South Pacific 
bounded by 8°-23° S. and 156°-l67° W. They 
are divisible into two groups, the northern 
Cooks which are small atolls, and the southern 
Cooks which, with one exception, are volcanic 
islands. The southern Cooks are surrounded by 
coral formations and in some cases have been 
raised so that the islands have a coral rim up 
to 300 ft. high. The largest island is Rarotonga, 
with an area of some 26 sq. mi. and rising to 
a height of 2,140 ft. The Society Islands, the 
next group to the east, lie some 600 mi. from 
Rarotonga. 
The island of Niue will be considered to- 
gether with the Cook Islands. This isolated is- 
land does not belong to any group. It lies at 
19° 10' S. and 169° 46' W., and consists of a 
flat coral formation raised to a height of some 
220 ft. above the sea, with an area of about 100 
sq. mi. It is situated some 580 mi. west of Ra- 
rotonga, 300 mi. east of Tonga, and 350 mi. 
southeast of Samoa. 
The spider fauna of these islands is not well 
known. The number of species recorded (Ber- 
land, 1934^; Marples, 1955^, 1957) are as fol- 
lows: Rarotonga, 13 species; Pukapuka, 8 
species; Aitutaki, 5 species; and Niue, 5 species. 
In the present paper some of these numbers are 
raised to: Aitutaki, 24 species; Niue, 30 species; 
while from islands with no previous records 
there are: Mangaia, 10 species; Rakahanga, 4 
species; Manihiki, 3 species; and Penrhyn, 1 
species. 1 am indebted to my wife and to my 
son Richard for the collections from Niue and 
Aitutaki, and to Dr. D. D. McCarthy for those 
from the other islands. The collections were 
made during expeditions under the auspices of 
the Medical Research Council of New Zealand. 
Niue is situated closer to the Samoa and 
Tonga groups and should be considered sep- 
1 Department of Zoology, University of Otago, 
Dunedin, New Zealand. Manuscript received May 26, 
1959. 
arately. Of the 30 species, 27 are recorded also 
from Samoa, 15 from the Cook Islands, and 11 
from the Society Islands. Samoa is the largest 
land mass in this region and the one whose 
spider fauna is best known. Fiji, to the west, 
has not yet been adequately explored. Of the 
three species recorded from Niue but not from 
Samoa, Nephila prolixa represents the most 
easterly extension of the genus in the Pacific. 
It occurs in Fiji and Tonga and was recorded 
by Koch ( 1871 ) some 90 years ago in Samoa, 
but it has not been recorded there since. Dras- 
sodes ciusi , a new record, was previously 
described from New Caledonia and the Loyalty 
Islands far to the west. The third species, Molli- 
cia microphthalma, has a wide distribution from 
the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and Loyalty 
Islands in the west, and to the Marquesas and 
Rapa in the east. It is also known from Tonga, 
the southern Cooks, and the Society and Aus- 
tral islands, but not from Fiji, Samoa, or the 
small islands to the north. This southern dis- 
tribution is unusual in such a widespread species. 
Thirty species are recorded from the southern 
Cooks, and 26 of them occur also in Samoa. Of 
the 4 which do not, one is Mollicia micro- 
phthalma already discussed, and 2 have not been 
recorded elsewhere. The fourth, Sandalodes 
calvus, is interesting, as it occurs to the east 
in the Society, Marquesas, and Tuamotu islands. 
Curiously enough, it is said to occur also in 
Australia. The genus Sandalodes has a distribu- 
tion unlike that of any other group in the 
Pacific, There are, in addition to 5'. calvus , 8 
species in Hawaii and 5 in the Marquesas. An- 
other possible link with the east is an immature 
salticid from Aitutaki which may be Laharulla 
insulana, recorded from Tahiti, but unfortu- 
nately it cannot be identified with certainty. 
The southern Cooks have 14 species in common 
with the Society Islands (Berland, 1934 h) but 
the remainder of these occur also in islands to 
the west. It is highly desirable that adequate 
collecting be carried out in Rarotonga, which, 
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