Figure 1.

Taxonomic bias in spider venom research. Given in (A) are spider families which have been studied for their venom so far, together with an assignment of threat potential and size. Brackets indicate that only a small fraction of included species are either dangerous or large. Further note that the grouping “other” in reality represents the remaining 109 spider families, thus “other” contains the majority of spider biodiversity. (B) Visualizes the percentage of deposited toxin sequences per family. Current knowledge on spider venom is mostly based on data from those larger and more dangerous lineages and therefore is taxonomically biased. Data from [5,7,8]; see [6] for an in-depth discussion on taxonomic bias in spider venom research.