Has this spider crawled across your Facebook feed recently? It’s causing quite a stir. Photo: ACT Parks and Conservation Service/Facebook.
A normal workday for some Canberra rangers was recently interrupted with a shock find.
The trapdoor spider has been found making its home in the Molonglo River Reserve by ACT Parks and Conservation Service staff during regular land management activities.
An ACT Government spokesperson said it was “really exciting” that the find had “generated excitement with the Canberra community”.
“We are still at the beginning stage of this discovery and look forward to sharing more information about this discovery in the coming weeks,” they said.
But there’s not too much known about the spider – after all, the ACT Parks and Conservation Service have revealed the species hasn’t been described, meaning that it lacks a formal scientific name and description.
Aracnophile Ben Shoard runs the Australian Spider Identification Facebook Page, a group with more than 115,000 total members dedicated to identifying spiders.
He says that scientists have actually known about the species’ existence for at least 10 years, when his then-research supervisor showed him a specimen, but each find brings new information for researchers.
“It’s undescribed, but that doesn’t reduce how exciting it is,” he says.
“It is always exciting finding something new about it. This builds up that evidence base.”
The next step is for scientists to formally award a scientific name to the species.
Ben wasn’t part of the team that found the species but says scientists can make a series of conclusions about it before it’s formally identified. Photo: Nic Vevers/ANU.
Ben says that process will include genetic testing to see how it is related to other trapdoor spiders and examining “all the little details” of a male and female specimen under a microscope.
“It’s more that no one’s had the time yet to really dive into it and describe it,” he says.
“There’s quite a process when they’re actually describing a species.”
But there are some features they can predict already.
“It will be in the trapdoor family – which is Idiopidae – and then it gets grouped into a genus, which is Idiosoma,” he says.
“We can tell its genus based on how its eyes are grouped together and the general body shape and structures that we can see.”
Other indicators are the size of its fangs (smaller than a funnel web spider) and the “sort of trapezium-shaped” eyes, Ben says.
While scientists have seen the spider across the ACT, it is most often found in “reserves, bushland and open woodland”.
“If you’ve done absolutely no landscaping and you happen to live backed onto a reserve, you might get some trapdoor spiders and some of those bigger, chunkier spiders,” he says.
“It’s quite prolific, but it won’t be something that pops up in people’s gardens. They will be fairly picky about where they actually live. It’ll be bushland and underserved habitat.”
And there’s good news for arachnophobes – its bite is (probably) not dangerous to humans.
“It will have some venom. But bees have venom, wasps have venom, even ants have venom,” he says.
“That’s based on what we know about every other spider in the family.”
