Serket (2014) vol. 14(2): 105-110. New data and records of spiders from North-Eastern Iran (Arachnida: Araneae) Hussein Sadeghi Namaghi 1 , Mahnaz Kaykhosravi 1 & Alireza Zamani 2* 1 Department of Plant Protection, College of Agriculture, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran 2 Department of Animal Biology, School of Biology and Centre of Excellence in Phylogeny of Living Organisms in Iran, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran * Corresponding e-mail address: a.zamani@ut.ac.ir Abstract This paper presents the results of a faunistic survey of spiders inhabiting agricultural crops in different locations of Razavi Khorasan province in North-Eastern Iran. Fifteen species belonging to 15 genera of 14 families were determined. Ten species are recorded for the fauna of Razavi Khorasan for the first time, including three species namely Zelotes puritanus Chamberlin, 1922, Pardosa azerifalcata Marusik, Guseinov & Koponen, 2003 and Heliophanus aeneus (Hahn, 1832), which are recorded for the first time from Iran. Keywords: Araneae, fauna, natural enemies, north-eastern Iran. Introduction Spiders are one of the most abundant predatory groups in the terrestrial ecosystems. Protection and promotion of these natural enemies in agro-ecosystems depend on the knowledge about their phenology, habitat preference and behaviour. To obtain such information, the first step is to know species composition of spiders inhabiting different field crops. The world spider fauna is comprised of 44906 described species that are classified into 3935 genera of 114 families (Platnick, 2014). Despite an increase in the studies on Iranian spiders during recent years, there are still many regions of the country that remain insufficiently investigated. Ghavami (2006) summarized the literature and gave a list of 244 species belonging to 33 families. In the following years, many faunistic and taxonomic studies have been conducted by Iranian researchers in different localities in Iran (Ghavami et al., 2007a; Ghavami et al., 2007b; Ghahari & Marusik, 2009; Moradmand & Jäger, 2011; Kashefi et al., 2013; Mirshamsi et al., 2013; Hosseini et al., 2014; Zamani, 2014a; Zamani, 2014b). As a result, the total number of spider species