Dispatch from the field II: Students describe an elusive spider while stationed in Borneo

A mystery has long shrouded the orb-weaving spider genus Opadometa, where males and females belonging to one and the same species look nothing alike. Furthermore, the males appear to be so elusive that scientists still doubt whether both sexes are correctly linked to each other even in the best-known species.

Such is the case for Opadometa sarawakensis – a species known only from female specimens. While remarkable with their striking red and blue colors and large size, the females could not give the slightest hint about the likely appearance of the male Opadometa sarawakensis.

The red and blue female Opadometa sarawakensis
The red and blue female Opadometa sarawakensis

Nevertheless, students taking part in a recent two-week tropical ecology field course organized by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University, and hosted by the Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) on the island of Borneo, Malaysia, found a mature male spider hanging on the web of a red and blue female, later identified as Opadometa sarawakensis. Still quite striking, the male was colored in a blend of orange, gray, black, and silver.

At the brink of a long-awaited discovery and eager to describe the male, the students along with their lecturers and the field station scientific staff encountered a peril – with problematic species like the studied orb weaver they were in need for strong evidence to prove that it matched the female from the web. Furthermore, molecular DNA-based analysis was not an option at the time, since the necessary equipment was not available at DGFC.

On the other hand, being at the center of the action turned out to have advantages no less persuasive than DNA evidence. Having conducted thorough field surveys in the area, the team has concluded that the male’s observation on that particular female’s web in addition to the fact that no other Opadometa species were found in the area, was enough to prove they were indeed representatives of the same spider.

Adapting to the quite basic conditions at the DGFC laboratory, the students and their mentors put in use various items they had on hand, including smartphones paired up with headlights mounted on gooseneck clips in place of sophisticated cameras.

In the end, they gathered all the necessary data to prepare the formal description of the newly identified male.

Once they had the observations and the data, there was only one question left to answer. How could they proceed with the submission of a manuscript to a scholarly journal, so that their finding is formally announced and recognised?

submitting

Thanks to the elaborated and highly automated workflow available at the peer-reviewed open access Biodiversity Data Journal and its underlying ARPHA Writing Tool, the researchers managed to successfully compile their manuscript, including all underlying data, such as geolocations, and submit it from the field station. All in all, the authoring, peer review and publication – each step taking place within the ARPHA Platform‘s singular environment – took less than a month to complete. In fact, the paper was published within few days after being submitted.

This is the second publication in the series “Dispatch from the field”, resulting from an initiative led by spider taxonomist Dr Jeremy Miller. In 2014, another team of students and their mentors described a new species of curious one-millimetre-long spider from the Danau Girang Field Center. Both papers serve to showcase the feasibility of publication and sharing of easy to find, access and re-use biodiversity data.

“This has been a unique educational experience for the students,” says Jeremy. “They got to experience how tropical field biologists work, which is often from remote locations and without sophisticated equipment. This means that creativity and persistence are necessary to solve problems and complete a research objective. The fact that the students got to participate in advancing knowledge about this remarkable spider species by contributing to a manuscript was really exciting.”

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Original source:

Miller J, Freund C, Rambonnet L, Koets L, Barth N, van der Linden C, Geml J, Schilthuizen M, Burger R, Goossens B (2018) Dispatch from the field II: the mystery of the red and blue Opadometa male (Araneae, Tetragnathidae, Opadometa sarawakensis). Biodiversity Data Journal6: e24777. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.6.e24777

Spider eat spider: Scientists discover 18 new spider-hunting pelican spiders in Madagascar

In 1854, a curious-looking spider was found preserved in 50 million-year-old amber. With an elongated neck-like structure and long mouthparts that protruded from the “head” like an angled beak, the arachnid bore a striking resemblance to a tiny pelican. A few decades later when living pelican spiders were discovered in Madagascar, arachnologists learned that their behavior is as unusual as their appearance, but because these spiders live in remote parts of the world they remained largely unstudied–until recently.

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, curator of arachnids and myriapods Hannah Wood has examined and analyzed hundreds of pelican spiders both in the field in Madagascar and through study of pelican spiders preserved in museum collections. Her analysis, focused on spiders of the Eriauchenius and Madagascarchaea genera, sorted the spiders she studied into 26 different species–18 of which have never before been described. Wood and colleague Nikolaj Scharff of the University of Copenhagen describe all 26 pelican spider species in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Zookeys.

159795_webWood says pelican spiders are well known among arachnologists not only for their unusual appearance, but also for the way they use their long “necks” and jaw-like mouthparts to prey on other spiders. “These spiders attest to the unique biology that diversified in Madagascar,” she said.

Pelican spiders are active hunters, prowling the forest at night and following long silk draglines that lead them to their spider prey. When a pelican spider finds a victim, it swiftly reaches out and impales it on its long, fang-tipped “jaws,” or chelicerae. Then it holds the capture away from its body, keeping itself safe from potential counterattacks, until the victim dies.

Today’s pelican spiders are “living fossils,” Wood says–remarkably similar to species found preserved in the fossil record from as long as 165 million years ago. Because the living spiders were found after their ancestors had been uncovered in the fossil record and presumed extinct, they can be considered a “Lazarus” taxon. In addition to Madagascar, modern-day pelican spiders have been found in South Africa and Australia–a distribution pattern that suggests their ancestors were dispersed to these landmasses when the Earth’s supercontinent Pangaea began to break up around 175 million years ago.

Madagascar is home to vast numbers of plant and animal species that exist only on the island, but until recently, only a few species of pelican spiders had been documented there. In 2000, the California Academy of Sciences launched a massive arthropod inventory in Madagascar, collecting spiders, insects and other invertebrates from all over the island.159828_web

Wood used those collections, along with specimens from other museums and spiders that she collected during her own field work in Madagascar, to conduct her study. Her detailed observations and measurements of hundreds of specimens led to the identification of 18 new species–but Wood says there are almost certainly more to be discovered. As field workers continue to collect specimens across Madagascar, “I think there’s going to be a lot more species that haven’t yet been described or documented,” she said.

The spiders Wood personally collected, including holotypes (the exemplar specimens) for several of the new species, will join the U.S. National Entomological Collection at the Smithsonian, the second-largest insect collection in the world, where they will be preserved and accessible for further research by scientists across the globe.

All of the pelican spiders that Wood described live only in Madagascar, an island whose tremendous biodiversity is currently threatened by widespread deforestation. The new species add to scientists’ understanding of that biodiversity, and will help Wood investigate how pelican spiders’ unusual traits have evolved and diversified over time. They also highlight the case for conserving what remains of Madagascar’s forests and the biodiversity they contain, she says.

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Funding for this study was provided by the Danish National Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

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Original source:

Wood HM, Scharff N (2018) A review of the Madagascan pelican spiders of the genera Eriauchenius O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1881 and Madagascarchaea gen. n. (Araneae, Archaeidae). ZooKeys 727: 1-96. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.727.20222

Seven new spider species from Brazil named after 7 famous fictional spider characters

Several literary classics from the fantasy genre are further immortalised and linked together thanks to a Brazilian research team who named seven new spiders after them.

Spider characters from A Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and the children’s favourite Charlotte’s Web and Little Miss Spider each gave a name to a new small cave-dwelling six-eyed spider inhabiting northern Brazil.

Discovered in iron caves across the state of Pará, northern Brazil, the new species belong to the same Neotropical genus Ochyrocera. They are described in a new research article published in the open access journal ZooKeys by Dr Antonio Brescovit, Dr Igor Cizauskas and Leandro Mota – all affiliated with Instituto Butantan, Sao Paulo.

Interestingly, while all seven previously unknown species prefer staying in the shadows underground, none of them has the adaptations characteristic for exclusively cave-dwelling organisms, such as loss of pigmentation and reduced or missing eyes. They are classified as edaphic troglophile species, which means that they are capable of completing their life cycle away from sunlight, but are not bound to the deepest recesses. Often crawling near the surface, they can even be spotted outside the caves. To describe the species, the scientists collected about 2,000 adult specimens following a 5-year series of field collection trips.

Ochyrocera varys predating on a fly [Fig. 21 A]The list of ‘fantasy’ spiders begins with Ochyrocera varys named after Lord Varys from George R. R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire. Lord Varys is also known as the Spider because of his manipulative skills and ability to ‘weave’ and command his networks of eyes-and-ears across two continents.

The name of Ochyrocera atlachnacha refers to the Spider God Atlach-Nacha from the universe created by H. P. Lovecraft. Atlach-Nacha is a giant spider with a human-like face which lives in the caves beneath a mountain and spins a web believed to link the world with the Dreamlands.

Two species are named after spider characters from the classic works by J. R. R. Tolkien. Ochyrocera laracna is a species named after the well-known giant spider Laracna (Shelob in English) who attacks main characters Frodo and Sam on their way to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings’ second volume – The Two Towers.

On the other hand, the Brazilian spider’s sibling – Ochyrocera ungoliant – is linked to Laracna’s mother. Ungoliant appears in Tolkien’s book The Silmarillion, whose events take place prior to those of The Lord of the Rings’ second volume The Two Towers. According to the story, Ungoliant translates to Dark Spider in Elvish.

Another staple in the 20th-century fantasy literature, the Harry Potter series, written by J. K. Rowling, also enjoys the attention of the researchers. The species Ochyrocera aragogue is an explicit reference to the talking Aragog, who lives in the dark recesses of the Forbidden Forest. In the second volume of the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, he confronts Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

The authors do not fail to pay tribute to much less violent spiders known from popular children books. David Kirk’s Little Miss Spider inspires the name of Ochyrocera misspider. The character is remembered with her words: “We have to be good to bugs; all bugs.”A couple of Ochyrocera misspider [Fig. 21 C]

The Ochyrocera charlotte species refers to Charlotte, the spider from E. B. White’s classic Charlotte’s Web who befriends the main character – Wilbur the pig.

It is highly likely that there are many species and populations of this group of spiders yet to be discovered in the Neotropics, since the lack of previous studies in the region. However, the area and its biodiversity are impacted by mining.

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Original source:

Brescovit AD, Cizauskas I, Mota LP (2018) Seven new species of the spider genus Ochyrocera from caves in Floresta Nacional de Carajás, PA, Brazil (Araneae, Ochyroceratidae). ZooKeys 726: 87-130. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.726.19778

New species of marine spider emerges at low tide to remind scientists of Bob Marley

It was 02:00h on 11 January 2009 when the sea along the coastline of Australia’s “Sunshine State” of Queensland receded to such an extent that it exposed a population of water-adapted spiders. The observant researchers who would later describe these spiders as a species new to science, were quick to associate their emergence with reggae legend Bob Marley and his song “High Tide or Low Tide”.

In their paper, published in the open access journal Evolutionary Systematics, the team of Drs. Barbara Baehr, Robert Raven and Danilo Harms, affiliated with Queensland Museum and the University of Hamburg, describe the new Bob Marley’s intertidal spider and also provide new information on two of its previously known, yet understudied, relatives from Samoa and Western Australia.

Unlike the spiders which people are familiar with, the intertidal species, whose representative is Bob Marley’s namesake, are truly marine. They have adapted to the underwater life by hiding in barnacle shells, corals or kelp holdfast during high tide. To breathe, they build air chambers from silk. Once the sea water recedes, though, they are out and about hunting small invertebrates that roam the surfaces of the nearby rocks, corals and plants.

The new species, listed under the scientific name of Desis bobmarleyi, is described based on male and female specimens spotted and collected from brain coral on that night in January.

Desis bomarleyi on brain coral photo Paul Hoye

Both sexes are characterised by predominantly red-brown colours, while their legs are orange-brown and covered with a dense layer of long, thin and dark grey hair-like structures. The females appear to be larger in size with the studied specimen measuring nearly 9 mm, whereas the male was about 6 mm long.

While the exact distribution range of the newly described species remains unknown, it is currently recorded from the intertidal zones of the Great Barrier Reef on the north-eastern coast of Queensland.

“The song ‘High Tide or Low Tide’ promotes love and friendship through all struggles of life,” explain the authors for their curious choice of a name. “It is his music that aided a field trip to Port Douglas in coastal Queensland, Australia, to collect spiders with a highly unique biology.”

Apart from reporting their research, the scientists use their paper to pay tribute to a German naturalist from the late 19th century – Amalie Dietrich, as well as the famous Jamaican singer and songwriter. Both admirable figures, even if representative of very different fields, are seen by the authors as examples of “the adventurous and resilient at heart” human nature in pursuit of freedom and independence.

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Original source:

Baehr BC, Raven R, Harms D (2017) “High Tide or Low Tide”: Desis bobmarleyi sp. n., a new spider from coral reefs in Australia’s Sunshine State and its relative from Sāmoa (Araneae, Desidae, Desis). Evolutionary Systematics 1: 111-120. https://doi.org/10.3897/evolsyst.1.15735

Bird spiders detectives: The solution to a 200-year-old hairy mystery

Three species and three genera of birdeater spiders are described as new to science in a paper recently published in the open access journal ZooKeys. In their study, the Brazilian spider experts, Drs. Caroline Fukushima and Rogério Bertani, Laboratory of Ecology and Evolution, Instituto Butantan, report the diversity of the oldest tarantula genus (Avicularia), whose name derives from a famous 18th-century illustration depicting a bird caught by a spider.

FIG 2Even though these harmless tarantulas have long been a favourite exotic pet around the world, their identity has remained problematic ever since the first species was described back in 1758 by the “father of modern taxonomy”, Carl Linnaeus.

“He described the species based on a hodgepodge of spiders,” explain the authors. “Over the next centuries, other species with completely different characteristics were called Avicularia creating a huge mess.” As a result, basic questions, such as the characteristic traits of the genus, the number of its species and their localities, have been left unanswered.

To address the confusion, the team studied both newly collected specimens and also specimens from around the world which had previously been deposited in museum collections. Thus, they concluded that, instead of the 49 species previously assigned to the problematic genus, there are in fact only 12, including three new to science.

One of the new species, Avicularia merianae, is named after Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717), a pioneering scientist and a remarkable artist who made the famous illustration of a spider eating a bird. In fact, it was her work that gave birth to the popular name used for a whole group of spiders, also known as birdeaters or bird spiders.

Meanwhile, the name of the new genus Ybyrapora, which occurs in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest, translates to “those that live in trees” from the indigenous local language Tupi. It refers to the arboreal habitat of these species. The other two tarantula genera live exclusively on the Caribbean Islands.

FIG 3“People think all biologists are like Indiana Jones, with their daily lives full of adventures in the wild. But most of the time, they are much more like Sherlock Holmes – sitting on a chair, collecting and analysing clues (specimens and scientific papers) and then using logical reasoning to solve Nature’s mysteries,” comments Dr. Caroline Fukushima.

“We, taxonomists, are ‘wildlife detectives’ who play an essential role not only in biology and conservation. Our work can also become the grounds for new technologies, medicines and ideas that could solve a variety of problems,” she adds.

“We are delighted to have finally closed one of the oldest unsolved cases,” the authors conclude.

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Original source:

Fukushima CS, Bertani R (2017) Taxonomic revision and cladistic analysis of Avicularia Lamarck, 1818 (Araneae, Theraphosidae, Aviculariinae) with description of three new aviculariine genera. ZooKeys 659: 1-185. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.659.10717

Family of scaffold web spiders increased with ~20% following discovery of 43 new species

Recent study into spider specimens collected from across China, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Madagascar over the past 15 years, revealed the striking number of 43 scaffold web spiders that have stayed hidden from science until now. By describing the new species in a paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys, scientists from Sichuan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences increase the number of a scaffold web spider family (Nesticidae), known from around the world, with about twenty percents.

The studied family of scaffold web spiders is a relatively small group of arachnids, which can be found at almost any locality, apart from Siberia, Central Asia, Northern and Southern Africa and places at high latitude. Prior to the study of Drs Yucheng Lin, Francesco Ballarin and Shuqiang Li, the species counted 245 in total, 12 of which are extinct and known from fossils only. A curious peculiarity in these spiders is their comb of serrated bristles, located on their rear legs, used to pull silk bands for their webs.

Although large-scale taxonomic surveys of scaffold web spiders have long remained scarce, recently the interest towards spider research in China and Southeast Asia has seen a significant rise. Thus, over the last 15 years, Chinese, American and European arachnologists have carried out several surveys, ending up with precious samples. As a result, Dr Yucheng Lin and his team followed with deeper morphological and molecular studies to discover remarkable diversity.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

In their work, the researchers have also established a new genus (Speleoticus) for five previously known, but misplaced species, which spend a lot of their time taking shelter in caves.

The majority of scaffold web spiders occur in temperate areas of the Holarctic realm, where the species tend to be medium-sized, long-legged, and prefer cave-like environments. The species found in the tropical and subtropical areas are, on the other hand, usually smaller, with shorter legs, and can be quite often spotted outside, where they crawl in forest litter, on grass, and under stones.

 

Original source:

Lin Y, Ballarin F, Li S (2016) A survey of the spider family Nesticidae (Arachnida, Araneae) in Asia and Madagascar, with the description of forty-three new species. ZooKeys 627: 1-168. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.627.8629

Species conservation profile of a critically endangered endemic for the Azores spider

Subject to continuing population decline due to a number of factors, an exclusively cave-dwelling (troglobitic) spider endemic to the Azores is considered as Critically Endangered according to the IUCN Red List criteria.

To provide a fast output, potentially benefiting the arachnid’s survival, scientists from the IUCN – Spider and Scorpion Specialist Group and the Azorean Biodiversity Group (cE3c) at University of Azores, where the main objective is to perform research that addresses societal challenges in ecology, evolution and the environment, also known as the three E’s from the centre’s name abbreviation, teamed up with colleagues from University of Barcelona, Spain, and the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

Together, they make use of a specialised novel publication type feature, called Species Conservation Profile, created by the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal, to provide scholarly credit and citation for the IUCN Red List species page, as well as pinpoint the population trends and the reasons behind them.

The studied spider species (scientifically called Turinyphia cavernicola) is a pale creature with long legs, large eyes and a total size of merely 2 mm in length. These spiders never leave their underground habitats, which are strictly humid lava tubes and volcanic pits. There they build sheet webs in small holes and crevices on the walls of the caves.

The volcanic pit Algar do Carvão (Terceira, Azores), the main location of the species Turyniphia cavernicola.Not only is the species restricted to a single island within the Azorean archipelago (Portugal), but it is only found in three caves. Furthermore, out of the three, only one of them is home to a sustainable large population. These caves are under severe threat due to pasture intensification, road construction and tourist activities.

Although there is not much information about the species distribution through the years, with the spider having been discovered as recently as in 2008, the authors make the assumption that originally there have been significantly greater populations. Not only have they studied thoroughly another fifteen caves located on the island without finding any individuals, but they have identified increasing anthropogenic impact on the habitat.

“The species original distribution was potentially very large compared with the current,” the scientists explain. “Relatively intensive searches in and around the current caves where the species occurs have failed to find additional subpopulations.”

“The trend of decline is based on the assumption that this species can occur in all these caves and that the absence is due to anthropogenic disturbance on caves during the last 50 years,” they note.

 

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Original source:

Borges P, Crespo L, Cardoso P (2016) Species conservation profile of the cave spiderTurinyphia cavernicola (Araneae, Linyphiidae) from Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal.Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e10274. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.4.e10274

New species of spider discovered ‘next door’ at the borders of cereal fields in Spain

The image that comes to mind when we think of new species being discovered is that of scientists sampling in remote tropical forests, where humans have barely set foot in. However, new species waiting to be discovered can in fact be very close to us, even if we live in a strongly humanized continent like Europe.

Scientists Eduardo Morano, University of Castilla-La Mancha, and Dr Raul Bonal, University of Extremadura, have discovered a new species of spider, formally called Cheiracanthium ilicis, in an area which does not match the image of a pristine habitat at all.

The new species was found in a strongly humanized area in central Spain, specifically, in isolated trees at the borders of cereal fields. These trees, mainly Holm oaks (Quercus ilex), are those remaining of the former oak woodlands that once covered the Iberian Peninsula and which have been cleared for centuries.

The systematic sampling revealed the newly discovered spider had a an exclusive preference for Holm Oaks, as all individuals were collected from the trunks and branches of these trees. Therefore, it was named after this tree’s scientific name “ilicis”.PIC_1_isolated_oak

While adults measure about a centimetre in body length, juveniles are smaller and have greenish colouration that mimics new oak shoots.

The mouthparts are proportionally large, as in the case of other species of the genus, like closely related C. mildei. In the case of the latter, the mouthparts are large enough to penetrate human skin, although the effects of the poison appear mild.

From a conservation perspective, the present study puts forward the need to preserve isolated trees in agricultural landscapes. They are not only a refuge to common forest organisms but to novel species yet to be discovered as well.

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Original source:

Morano E, Bonal R (2016) Cheiracanthium ilicis sp. n. (Araneae, Eutichuridae), a novel spider species associated with Holm Oaks (Quercus ilex). ZooKeys 601: 21-39. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.601.8241

A hair’s breadth away: New tarantula species and genus honors Gabriel García Márquez

With its extraordinary defensive hairs, a Colombian tarantula proved itself as not only a new species, but also a new genus. It is hypothesised that the new spider is the first in its subfamily to use its stinging hairs in direct attack instead of ‘kicking’ them into the enemy.

Described in the open access journal ZooKeys by an international research team, led by Carlos Perafán, University of the Republic, Uruguay, the name of the new spider genus honours an indigenous people from the Caribbean coast region, whose language and culture are, unfortunately, at serious risk of extinction. Meanwhile, its species’ name pays tribute to renowned Colombian author and Nobel laureate for his novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ Gabriel García Márquez.male kankuamo

The new tarantula, formally called Kankuamo marquezi, was discovered in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. When examined, the arachnid showed something extraordinary about its defensive hairs and its genitalia. The hairs were noted to form a small oval patch of lance-shaped barbs, hypothesised by the scientists to have evolved to defend their owners by direct contact.

On the other hand, when defending against their aggressors, the rest of the tarantulas in this subfamily need to first face the offender and then vigorously rub their hind legs against their stomachs. Aimed and shot at the enemy, a ball of stinging hairs can cause fatal injuries to small mammals when landed into their mucous membrane (the layer that covers the cavities and shrouds the internal organs in the body). Once thrown, the hairs leave a bald spot on the tarantula’s belly.

“This new finding is a great contribution to the knowledge of the arachnids in Colombia and a sign of how much remains to be discovered,” point out he authors.

Figure 8“The morphological characteristics present on Kankuamo marquezi open the discussion about the phylogenetics relationship between subfamilies of Theraphosidae tarantulas and the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to the urticating hairs.”

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Original source:

Perafán C, Galvis W, Gutiérrez M, Pérez-Miles F (2016) Kankuamo, a new theraphosid genus from Colombia (Araneae, Mygalomorphae), with a new type of urticating setae and divergent male genitalia. ZooKeys 601: 89-109. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.601.7704

Flightless survivors: Incredible invertebrate diversity in Los Angeles metropolitan area

Urban wildlife is surprisingly understudied. We tend to know more about animals in exotic places than about those that live in our cities.

This is why researchers Emile Fiesler, president of Bioveyda Biological Inventories, Surveys, and Biodiversity Assessments, USA, and Tracy Drake, manager of the Madrona Marsh Preserve, looked into the fauna of the Madrona Marsh Preserve, California, a small nature preserve in one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.

Consequently, they published the astonishing number of 689 species of invertebrates, which have managed to survive decades of farming and oil exploration, followed by development pressures, in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal. The study was minimally invasive as the live animals have been recorded with macro-photography.

Even though it is the insects that first developed the ability to fly, long before the dinosaurs became birds, the latter have always received the most of our attention. This major evolutionary breakthrough, which has occurred more than once in the past, is also a reason why insects are currently the most diverse animals on earth in terms of number of species.

“Insects and other invertebrates have filled all ecological niches and all corners of our planet,” explain the authors. “No surprise that these small creatures conquered our cities and invaded our homes as well.”

Most of the urban dwellers, however, have been introduced – accidentally or deliberately – by humans.

“The remainder – native ‘wild’ species – are able to survive in the city mainly due to their adaptivity,” they point out. “It is therefore surprising to find a number of flightless species in a small area surrounded by urbanization.”

The Madrona Marsh Preserve is located in Torrance, which is part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area is one of the world’s largest, with a human population of more than 17 million.

Figure 2 = Bradynobaenid Wasp Fiesler-2016The Madrona Marsh Preserve, boasting seasonal wetlands, is well known as a birdwatchers’ paradise. Besides birds, its other vertebrates (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes), as well as its flowering plants, are relatively well known. The invertebrate fauna of the Preserve, on the other hand, aside from butterflies and dragonflies, was virtually unknown.

Interestingly, night surveys revealed the presence of a ‘second shift’ diversity, or creatures seemingly complementary to those active during the day.

Among the long-time survivors are wingless camel crickets as well as velvet ants, which are wasps whose flightless females look like furry ants. Another curiosity that intrigued the researchers is an obscure flightless female bradynobaenid wasp.

The researchers were especially surprised by their encounter with a large Solifugid [image 3] – also known as Camel Spider or Wind Scorpion. Solifugids are little-known arachnids that are neither spiders, nor scorpions, and can grow up to 15 cm (6 in). Their order’s name Solifugae translates from Latin as “those that flee from the sun”.Figure 3 = Solifugid Fiesler-2016

All in all, the biodiversity study resulted in 689 species without a backbone, belonging to 13 classes, 39 orders, and 222 families, found on this island surrounded by urbanization.

“Not unlike the moas and dodos, these ‘island’ inhabitants stayed grounded through the ages,” acknowledge the researchers.

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Original source:

Fiesler E, Drake T (2016) Macro-invertebrate Biodiversity of a Coastal Prairie with Vernal Pool Habitat. Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e6732. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.4.e6732

 

About the authors:

Emile Fiesler is president of Bioveyda Biodiversity Inventories, Surveys, and Studies, and Tracy Drake is manager of the Madrona Marsh Preserve.