Photo: Kasi Metcalfe, Flickr Creative Commons
Arachnophiles are in for a treat this Halloween: A new super-sized spider. Scientists have christened Nephila komaci the largest web-spinning spider that has ever been found. Claiming all the credit for the species’ bulk are the komaci females, which can grow as big as a teacup saucer—as much as five times the size of their fellas—and spin a web at least three feet wide.
Nephila, from the ancient Greek “fond of spinning,” represents the genus containing the golden orb weaving spiders, named for their spectacular webs of flaxen silk. The report in the journal PLos ONE marks the first new Nephila species discovered since 1879. Back in 2000 Matjaz Kunter, an arachnologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences, was looking through museum specimens when he found the first clue to komaci’s existence: a female spider like none he had ever seen before, collected in South Africa in 1978. Two wilderness expeditions turned up nothing. Then in 2003 a second museum specimen surfaced in Madagascar. Still, with no recent specimens the species was thought to have maybe gone the way of the dinosaurs or to be a hybrid. That is until three spiders were collected in 2007 from South Africa’s Tembe Elephant Park—confirmation of a valid new species.
“Arachnologists describe 400 to 500 new species a year, and that low number is entirely due to the rarity of arachnologists, not new species awaiting discovery,” said coauthor Jonathan Coddington of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in an email from Denmark. “The odd thing about komaci was that, among Nephila, no new species were anticipated. We thought we were done. Nephila is one of the best sampled groups of spiders…This [discovery] says that we still know very little about earth, that a species this large, this obvious, went undiscovered for so long.”