Extinct mega spider found alive and well in Africa - October 21, 2009
The world’s largest orb weaver spider has been discovered, lurking malevolently in the jungles of Africa.
Matjaž Kuntner and Jonathan Coddington, of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Smithsonian Institution respectively, describe the giant beastie in PLOS One and name it Nephila komaci. The bodies of females average 3.8 cm while the legs are 10 cm long each. Webs from the spider are likely to be over a metre across, capable of trapping bats, birds and even small humans (maybe).
“The genus Nephila already contained the largest orbweaving spiders, but N. komaci now becomes the largest Nephila species known,” they write.
The animal is named after Kuntner's late friend Andrej Komac.
A specimen of this huge spider was first collected in 1978 from Sodwana Bay in South Africa but two subsequent expeditions to find more were unsuccessful, leading scientists to conclude that either the animal was a hybrid or it had become extinct. Then a second animal, originally hailing from Madagascar, was discovered in a museum in 2003. A search of museums again turned up nothing, adding weight to the extinction theory.
Then something wonderful happened (unless you’re an arachnophobe, in which case something terrible happened): in the authors’ words “two additional females and a male were recently collected in Tembe Elephant Park by South African colleagues, and it is now clear that N. komaci is a valid, new extant Nephila species”.
However Kunter and Coddington appear to have made one shocking error. They don’t have any photos of the animal…
Image: this is acutally Nephila inaurata, not Nephila komaci / M. Kuntner
