WCO-Lite

The complete taxonomy of world harvestmen

This project is a catalogue on Opiliones aiming to provide an accurate and up-to-date taxonomic backbone for this order of arachnids.

Photo (c) Joost Thissen, Leiobunum rotundum, The Netherlands,

How to cite

WCO-Lite: a fresh look at the harvest-spiders (Arachnida: Opiliones)

The taxonomy of harvest-spiders is now at your fingertips... We roamed ancient crypts and somber dungeons, we sifted all the sacred grimoires and dusty incunabula, and we peered into the despairing nomenclatural labyrinths so you won’t have to.

Exhaustive until dec 2019

This catalogue offers a comprehensive overview of Opiliones species until December 2019. Note that information beyond that period may not be fully up to date.

How to cite

Kury, A.B., Mendes, A.C., Cardoso, L., Kury, M.S., Granado, A.de A., Giribet, G., Cruz-López, J.A., Longhorn, S.J., Medrano, M., Oliveira, A.B.R. de, Kury, I.S. & Souza-Kury, M.A. (2026) World Catalogue of Opiliones. WCO-Lite version 2.8. Online at: https://wcolite.com/.

Short citation: Kury, A.B. et al. (2020 onward). WCO-Lite. Available at wcolite.com. (Accessed on [date])

Our Team

Adriano Brilhante Kury

Project coordinator

Amanda Cruz Mendes

Researcher

Lilian Cardoso

Researcher

Milena Souza Kury

Researcher

Alexia de Andrade Granado

Researcher

Gonzalo Giribet

Researcher

Jesús A. Cruz-López

Researcher

Stuart J. Longhorn

Researcher

Miguel Medrano

Researcher

Ana Beatriz Ramos de Oliveira

Researcher

Ian Kury

Backend developer

Maria Kury

Frontend developer

Our Partners

What is WCO-Lite

The WCO project started with an annotated catalogue of the New World Laniatores (Kury 2003). Then it has been expanded to include all suborders of harvestmen and all Earth realms, instead of only the Nearctic and Neotropical, and is currently in manuscript form as a conventional paper catalogue.

The current team, led by Kury, started to transfer all information of the MS to the TaxonWorks platform in layers, aiming to go deeper and deeper to become a repository of various kinds of information on these organisms, but especially a complete/reliable/authoritative source of taxonomic/nomenclatural information on harvestmen.

There are two public interfaces at wcolite.com and catalogueoflife.org, which are often updated, and the goals are described in detail in Kury et al. (2021).

References:

Kury, A. B., 2003. Annotated catalogue of the Laniatores of the New World (Arachnida, Opiliones). Revista Iberica de Aracnología, Zaragoza, vol. especial monográfico, nº 1: 1-337.

Kury AB, Mendes AC, Cardoso L, Kury MS, Granado AA, Yoder MJ & Kury IS (2021) WCO-Lite version 1.1: an online nomenclatural catalog of harvestmen of the World (Arachnida, Opiliones) curated in TaxonWorks. Zootaxa, 4908 (3): 447–450.

Institutions:

AB KURY, L CARDOSO. Departamento de Invertebrados, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
AC MENDES. Departamento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biologia Roberto de Alcantara Gomes, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
MS KURY. Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Centre Eau, Terre et Environnement, 490 Couronne St, Quebec City, Quebec G1K 9A9, Canada.
AA GRANADO. Departamento de Vertebrados, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
G GIRIBET. Museum of Comparative Zoology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
JA CRUZ-LÓPEZ. Centro Regional de Investigación Pacífico Sur (CIRPAS), Campo Experimental Valles Centrales de Oaxaca, Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP), Villa de Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico.
SJ LONGHORN. Arachnology Research Association, United Kingdom.