Christa L. Deeleman-Reinhold

Christa Laetitia Deeleman-Reinhold (23 November 1930 – 26 March 2025) was a Dutch arachnologist. She specialized in spiders from Southeast Asia and Southern Europe, particularly cave-dwelling and tropical spiders. She donated a collection of about 25,000 Southeast Asian spiders, the largest collection of Southeast Asian spiders in existence, to the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden. In addition to numerous articles, she wrote the book Forest Spiders of South East Asia (2001).

Deeleman-Reinhold was born on 23 November 1930 to Dutch parents on the island of Java, Dutch East Indies. Her family returned to the Netherlands in 1935, and she entered Leiden University in 1949. After three years she began working at the Dutch National Museum of Natural History, studying mantises under museum director Hilbrand Boschma. She began studying spiders as a postgraduate, first studying Dutch ground spiders, and later cave spiders of the genus Troglohyphantes under the supervision of J. T. "Koos" Wiebes, and earned a PhD from Leiden University in 1978. She was married to businessman Paul Robert Deeleman, who accompanied her on multiple collecting expeditions to Yugoslavia and Southeast Asia. Her husband died in 1989, and she spent the next decade working on her mangum opus, Forest Spiders of South East Asia (2001), a nearly 600-page work in which she revised six spider families, describing 18 new genera and 115 new species. She continued to actively publish until the age of 93. Reinhold died on 26 March 2025, at the age of 94.