While the Belgian community of eight-legged animals shudders with fear in view of the next excursion of the flourishing Arabel (Arachnologia Belgica), one little group keeps his peace of mind: the Harvestmen. The majority of arachnologists has lost interest since some simple youth experiments with the legs. I couldn't beat the knowledge of the Arabel-people, so I took the Opiliones as my territory.

Dr. Baert (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences) kindly put the relevant collections at my disposal. Although Opiliones were never the object of a dedicated sampling session, the bottles were rich enough to keep me happy for several years on row. I added some material from my own entomological studies during the 1980s and from the former Laboratory of Oecology of the State University of Ghent. Another important source of information, mainly about the western part of the country, were the data obtained by W. Slosse with his pitfall campaigns during 1994-'96. Maps based on all this observations were drawn and made available on the internet in June 1999.

A new set of maps was drawn in 2004. The samples of several more pitfall campaigns were included. I walked through the old dataset, checked suspicious observations and made corrections if necessary.

The third set of maps was published on paper in 2010. A digital version is available through a link on this page.

More recently some new species (Nemastoma dentigerum, Nelima doriae) were found in Belgium and Trogulus nepaeformis s.l. is now known to be two species: T. closanicus and T. nepaeformis.

Though Gyas titanus is mentioned in an article from 1933 (see below), we don't think the species is still present in Belgium; if it ever has been.