Last year, University of British Columbia zoologist Wayne Maddison travelled to the highlands of southern Mexico in pursuit of undiscovered species of jumping spiders. He kept a journal of his adventures, documenting his encounters with resplendently beautiful arachnids. Below is a short excerpt from his journal. You can read the full report of the expedition on Maddison’s website.
28 June 2017
It’s been more than three years since I’ve been on a major field expedition. Today I fly to Mexico to begin three weeks in the mountains of Oaxaca and Chiapas with fellow salticidologists (jumping spider experts)! We will be looking for new species of jumping spiders, with special focus on Mexigonus, a genus with only a few known species.
There are many poorly studied groups of spiders, so why did we choose to focus on Mexigonus? Because of the mountain ranges that fragment the Mexican highlands into isolated patches of habitats, Mexigonus spiders diversified into many unique species. Studying the diversity of Mexigonus species and their evolutionary relationships could help us understand the biological history of this region.
Another attraction of Mexigonus is the red courtship ornamentation that males of some species have — attractive to female spiders perhaps, but to us scientists, attractive because red ornamentation is not common in jumping spiders. There’s a good chance that most jumping spiders can’t distinguish red (they are colour blind, in a sense), and so when we find a spider that can, it could tell us something about the evolution of colour vision.
Continue reading at University of British Columbia.
Image via University of British Columbia.