Tarantulas make their homes everywhere from dusty desert burrows to a rainforest canopy. Now, researchers have discovered a tarantula new to science that dwells entirely within the hollow stems of bamboo, a first for this group of colossal, woolly spiders.
– first encountered the spiders while visiting a jungle in Tak province, in the north-west of the country, noticing a brown tarantula with narrow, light bands on the legs dropping from a hollow bamboo stem , or “culm”. Sippawat sent a photo of the tarantula to , an arachnologist at Khon Kaen University, who immediately suspected the creature was undescribed.
“I said, ‘Oh my goodness! For science, this will be a new tarantula’,” says Chomphuphuang.
Advertisement
In July 2020, Chomphuphuang and his colleagues accompanied Sippawat to the forest outside of the village of Mae Tho to find and collect some of the tarantulas. Back at the laboratory, the researchers made detailed measurements of the spiders’ physical features and compared them to other related species. Based on key differences in features of the legs and the shape of the male sexual organs, the team not only assigned the tarantula to a new species, but to a totally new genus: Taksinus.
“Taksinus” refers to Taksin the Great, a king who once governed Tak province. The species is also the only member of the Asian “earth tiger” tarantula subgroup found in Thailand that lives and nests in tall vegetation rather than on the ground.
Taksinus bambus is the first tarantula species known to live specifically within bamboo stems. Chomphuphuang and his team searched trees and other plants near where they found T. bambus, but the arachnids were strictly confined to bamboo.
This pickiness is unusual, says at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, since tarantulas are typically flexible in how they meet their habitat needs.
It is possible, says Chomphuphuang, that these tarantulas have “adapted to living in bamboo for millions of years”.
Residing in bamboo could have survival benefits, he adds, “because the slippery nature of the bamboo surface allows only a few creatures to climb”, limiting what kinds of predators the tarantula may face.
Foley says T. bambus is a “really unique species”, noting that the discovery aids the cataloguing of biodiversity. “When we’re losing forests at the rate that we are, we can’t really protect what we don’t know is out there.”
The finding, she says, is a rare insight into tarantulas as intimately woven into the larger ecosystem. T. bambus doesn’t just have a panda-like dependence on bamboo, it also probably relies on other species too. For instance, it might not carve its own holes in bamboo but instead take advantage of those produced by a species of bamboo-nesting carpenter bee.
This could mean that if habitat or climate changes make the forest an “unliveable place” for the hole-digging insects, then T. bambus “won’t have a very happy time”, says Foley.
Much of the spider’s behaviour, ecological role and mating habits are still unknown, which gives Chomphuphuang and his colleagues many avenues to investigate.
Zookeys
Sign up to Wild Wild Life, a free monthly newsletter celebrating the diversity and science of animals, plants and Earth’s other weird and wonderful inhabitants