National Geographic has details that are bound to give arachnophobes THE WILLIES, but for the rest of us, there’s this rather large spider in Angola that’s new to science, walking around with a large, slightly squishy horn on its back:
“I knew then we had discovered a new species. It’s rare to know you have something special so early in the process,” [discoverer John Midgely] says.
The team named the new tarantula Ceratogyrus attonitifer, from the Latin for “bearer of astonishment,” and published their results this week in the journal African Invertebrates.
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In 2015, the National Geographic Society and an international team of scientists launched the Okavango Wilderness Project to survey and protect this important and underappreciated region.
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In a grassy seasonal wetland surrounding a lake in Angola (Midgley didn’t say exactly where to prevent the theft of these tarantulas for the pet trade), he identified a series of inch-wide holes going almost two feet straight into the ground.
To see if anything was living inside, he inserted a blade of grass. Immediately something tugged on the end. He returned that night, and as soon as he felt a bite at the other end, he slowly pulled the tarantula out of its burrow.
“It was a lot like fishing,” Midgley says. “If you don’t hold on tight, they can pull the grass right out of your hand.”
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The large horn on the tarantula’s back immediately classified it as a member of the genus Ceratogyrus. Many spiders in this group have similar protuberances, but they are much smaller and harder.
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Although Midgley found ten burrows in the 300 square meters surrounding his campsite—a high density for a predator—he only found the species surrounding one particular Angolan lake.