B. K. Tikader

Benoy Krishna Tikader was an Indian arachnologist and zoologist and a leading expert on Indian spiders in his time. He was a member of the Zoological Survey of India and the author of the most comprehensive work on Indian spiders to date, Handbook of Indian Spiders first published in 1987. The book describes 40 families and 1066 species of India, many of which were discovered by Tikader himself. The handbook is a guide to all arachnids including scorpions, and not just spiders. He was also a popular scientific author in his native language of Bengali, and was the author of Banglar Makorsha (literally: "Bengal's spiders") for the layman.

Focus on eastern India

Working in the Zoological Survey of India based in Kolkata, Tikader was especially interested in the spiders of eastern India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Many of his nomenclatures thus bear names of places in eastern India as part of their specific scientific name - like andamanensis (from the Andaman Islands), bengalensis (from the region of Bengal, and dhakuriensis (from the neighbourhood of Dhakuria, in Kolkata, often based on the region of discovery or distribution.

Honours

He held PhD and DSc degrees from Calcutta University.^[1]

Quite a few species are named in his honour, including six from one family. While being a testament to the quality and importance of his work, having multiple species named after one is not usual for scientists working in such areas of "dense phylogenies".

Fish:

• Nemacheilus tikaderi (originally Aborichthys tikaderi ) of the family Balitoridae (Barman, 1985)

Spiders:

• Nodocion tikaderi of the family Gnaphosidae (Gajbe, 1992)
• Eilica tikaderi of the family Gnaphosidae (Platnick, 1976)
• Drassodes tikaderi (Gajbe, 1987)
• Poecilochroa tikaderi of the family Gnaphosidae (Patel, 1989)
• Petrotricha tikaderi of the family Gnaphosidae (Gajbe, 1983)
• Scopoides tikaderi of the family Gnaphosidae (Gajbe, 1987)
• Mimetus tikaderi of the family Mimetidae (Gajbe, 1992)
• Marpissa tikaderi (Biswas, 1984)
• Chorizopes tikaderi of the family Araneidae (Sadana & Kaur, 1974)
• Olios tikaderi of the family Sparassidae (Kundu, Biswas & Raychaudhuri, 1999)
• Clubiona tikaderi of the family Clubionidae (Majumder & Tikader, 1991)
• Pardosa tikaderi of the family Lycosidae (Arora & Monga, 1994)
• Oxyopes tikaderi of the family Oxyopidae (Biswas & Majumder, 1995)
• Theridion tikaderi (Patel, 1973)
• Pistius tikaderi (Kumari & Mittal, 1999)
• Xysticus tikaderi (Bhandari & Gajbe, 2001)
• Storena tikaderi of the family Zodariidae (Patel & Reddy, 1989)

Important publications

• Tikader B K (1982), Fauna of India: Arachnid Vol 2: Spiders, Zoological Survey of India
• Tikader B K (1983), Threatened Animals of India, Zoological Survey of India, Calcutta
• Tikader B K and Bastwade D (1983), Fauna of India: Arachnid Vol 3: Scorpions, Zoological Survey of India, Calcutta, India.
• Tikader B K (1987) Handbook of Indian Spiders, Zoological Survey of India, Calcutta, India.

References