Spiders have evolved creative strategies to allow them to thrive in habitats across the globe. The one thing that seems to elude them though, is the ability to charm the humans that they encounter.
It's tarantula season in the golden hills of the Bay Area: that period every fall when black, hairy males of the species Aphonopelma iodius emerge from their underground burrows in search of a receptive female—a first and ...
The Nullarbor is one of Australia's iconic natural places. It's renowned as a vast and mostly treeless plain. But hidden beneath this ancient landscape is an immense network of caves.
A team of Australian scientists led by Australian Museum (AM) and University of New South Wales (UNSW) paleontologist Dr. Matthew McCurry have formally named and described a fossil spider, Megamonodontium mccluskyi, which ...
One of New Zealand's most exceptional fossil sites may soon be open to scientists again following a land purchase that saved it from commercial mining.
The Colombian Pacific region, nestled within the heart of the Chocó Biogeographic Region, has unveiled some of its remarkable biological wonders. Recognized as one of the world's most enigmatic biodiversity hotspots, this ...
The complex mating rituals of the Sydney funnel-web spider have now been described in detail for the first time, with sexual routines including leg and body vibrations and female lifting, filling a missing link in the study ...
A trio of arachnologists at Queensland Museum Collections and Research Center, has described the rediscovery of a species of giant trapdoor spider believed to live in hidden parts of Queensland, Australia. In their study, ...
What's stronger and tougher than steel, and more elastic than rubber, weight for weight? Spider silk is, and this incredibly versatile material could transform engineering, materials science and even medicine—if we could ...
When UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral scholar Merly Escalona assembled the first-ever reference genome for the Stephen Colbert Trapdoor Spider, she was shocked by the dataset's unexpectedly large size. For a small invertebrate, ...
