''Rarahu'' is a

genus Genus (; : genera ) is a taxonomic rank above species and below family (taxonomy), family as used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In bino ...

jumping spiders Jumping spiders are a group of spiders that constitute the family Salticidae. , this family contained over 600 described genera and over 6,000 described species, making it the largest family of spiderscomprising 13% of spider species. Jumping s ...

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found only in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also foun ...

Samoa Samoa, officially the Independent State of Samoa and known until 1997 as Western Samoa, is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania, in the South Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main islands (Savai'i and Upolu), two smaller, inhabited ...

. , it contains only one species, ''Rarahu nitida''. Berland probably adapted the genus name ''Rarahu'' from

Pierre Loti Pierre Loti (; pseudonym of Louis Marie-Julien Viaud ; 14 January 1850 – 10 June 1923) was a French naval officer and novelist, known for his exotic novels and short stories.This article is derived largely from the ''Encyclopædia Britannica Ele ...

's book of the same name, which was published in 1880. Loti himself either used the rare Tahitian word "rarahu", meaning (amongst other things) "to eat '' tapu'' things", or changed the name of the volcano " Raraku".Mabbott 1946 The species name is from

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

''nitida'' "shining", "handsome", or "neat" (a

false cognate False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds or spelling and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For exampl ...

Footnotes

References

* (1946): The Origin of Pierre Loti's Name "Rarahu". ''Modern Language Notes'' 61(4): 288. * (2007)
The world spider catalog
version 8.0. ''American Museum of Natural History''.

External links

Salticidae Endemic fauna of Samoa Monotypic Salticidae genera Spiders of Oceania {{salticidae-stub