PARIS: Thirteen new species of spider have been discovered on Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula.
The new creepy crawlies were unearthed by scientists, teachers and indigenous rangers as part of a 10-day journey to the largely unsurveyed area.
It’s called the Bush Blitz and is a combined project of the Australian government, BHP Billiton Sustainable Communities and Earthwatch Australia.Teacher Leslie Carr from Melbourne’s Maribyrnong primary School says she signed up to search the Olkola people’s traditional lands so she could relay her adventures to her students.
But to find their eight-legged subjects, participants had to roll up their sleeves.“It was a lot of digging – I was amazed,” Ms Carr is quoted.
“I thought I’d get up there and they’d be crawling around.
“But they go down 20 to 30 centimetres.”
The team used abalone knives to dig into the hard earth, before swapping them for pen knives when they got closer to a silk-lined burrow.The hard work paid off, with the 13 new spider types including a brush-footed trapdoor spider and the newly christened mouse spider, which lives in a stocking-shaped web.
Then there were the tarantulas.
“There were ones as big as your hand, about 20 of them,” says Ms Carr.
The science teacher says the savanna-like environment is dotted with termite mounds and very dry.
Now she’s back home, she says her students are full of questions about her run-in with Australia’s newly identified arachnids.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
WASHINGTON: Electric carmaker Tesla announced Sunday it was upgrading its Autopilot software to use more advanced radar technology. In a...
