This relic of the Jurassic era survived 150 million years on earth – now it is a big fire of extinction | Kangaroo Island

Over the past five weeks, Jane Ogilvie has searched a dense shrub shaded with sugar gum on Kangaroo Island in South Australia for a surviving relic of 150 meters ago.

The only known house in the spider of the Kangaroo island in critical danger, either in the northwest of the island, where the spider of the Jurassic era hides in wet tufts of leaf litter.

In more than a month of research, and with only a few more weeks, Ogilvie and some aid found only one small juvenile.

“We are so excited when we find a good area, but it deflates. Everything is so dry – it is barely rainy for two years, ”explains Ogilvie, a conservation biologist working with the Australian invertebrates charity.

Last year, scientists found a single mature woman and six juveniles in six places, all in an area of 20 km2 which includes a field of land belonging to the Mining Andrew Forrest billionaire.

These same places came empty this year. Spiders need the wet microclimate of the sheet litter to survive, but there is a trifecta of threats that dry their habitat and grow them more and more from extinction.

The latest Bolthmus remaining of Spider was on an almost record drought in the last 18 months, with the lowest precipitation ever recorded since 1900.

Black summer bush fires have burned through large potential housing areas that have not yet restored, and an invasive vegetable root disease known as phytophthora damages the forest canopy and plants that hold part of the leaves of leaves where spiders live, dry even more habitat.

“If we look at the risks and [are] Realistic, they are potentially a big fire far from extinction, “explains Dr. Michael Rix, the main and conservative scientist of Arachnology in Queensland Museum, who collected the first spider specimens and, with the scientific colleague Mark Harvey, officially described them.

“By all objective measures, its existence is precarious phenomenal.”

Natural assassins

The Spider assassin of the island of Kangaroo is one of the 11 invertebrates on the priority list of the federal government of endangered species.

The family of assassin of spiders – which takes their name from their habit of tracking slowly and then to eat other spiders – are only found in Australia, Madagascar and in certain parts of southern Africa.

The assassin of the island of Kangaroo was found in 2010 by Rix, which, with Harvey, described 37 of the 41 spiders of Australian assassin.

“We collect this litter of suspended leaves and shake it. The spiders close their legs and they fall. I looked in the set to see what is there – I knew it was not described. It was one of the truly memorable moments of my career in biology in the field. Very exciting, ”he recalls.

Rix says they have the most unusual appearance of any spider, with “incredible raised heads and long oral parts in the shape of a spear”.

“They are undoubtedly,” he says. “They are an early branch of the spider spider.

“They were only known as fossils before living people were found in Madagascar in the 19th century.”

“ It’s tight ”

The species of the island of Kangaroo have been feared extinct after bush fires swept the west of the island in the black summer bush fires of 2019 and 2020 until Dr Jess Marsh, researcher at the University of Adélaide and a biologist of inverted conservation based on the island, finds two specimens in 2021 in a small patch of non -rewarded vegetation.

“He is in a hurry in smaller and smaller areas,” says Marsh. “Each survey that we make increases our confidence that it limits this plot of vegetation, and nowhere else.”

Marsh and his colleagues now discuss the idea of establishing a reproduction program for spiders in a zoo, creating an “insurance population” – but the elimination of nature individuals involves clear risks which, according to Marsh, would not be taken lightly.

“They have survived mass extinction events and past climate change – a huge amount. Now, in this short period, it is the humans who really test them. ”

Ghost extinctions

Rix says that the precarious situation in which spiders are part of a much greater wave of largely invisible extinctions of invertebrates.

Officially, Australia lists only one invertebrate as extinguished – the earthworm of Lake Pedder.

But last year, Rix, Marsh and his colleagues published research which estimated that since the European Invasion of Australia, around 9,000 invertebrates had probably underwent a so -called ghost extinction – “the loss of non -discovered species which have left no trace”.

“Some people could say:” Who cares about a small spider who disappears “?” said rix. “But that is part of the quantum of invertebrate extinctions that we are experiencing at the moment. It could be a problem that slips on us.

“There is a concept of conservation of evolutionary evolutionary units – to keep the diversity that is deeply speaking of the evolutionary history of the earth. This is what these spiders are – a window on the past. They are survivors. Trying to keep them is so important.”

Marsh and Rix were the only two to have found an assassin spider on the island of Kangaroo, until the discovery of this week – not by a scientist, but a 17 -year -old enthusiastic volunteer called Jack Wilson who filled his time during the school holidays.

“It was probably my 10th sieve of the day,” he said.

“They can look like small stains of dirt, but it’s the big neck that gives them. I’m quite dropped. It’s crazy.”