March 13, 2012

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Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity

By Wayne Maddison

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Biologists have discovered and recognized just under 2 million different species of living organisms on Earth, most of which are small things like insects. This seems like a big number, and so perhaps you think the Age of Discovery is over, that we have our own planet pretty much figured out.

Far from it.

Various studies have estimated that anywhere from 5 to 100 million species are on Earth right now, and so we are less than half way to discovering the basic units of biodiversity. In understanding life, we biologists are working on a puzzle with most of the pieces still hidden in the box.

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As an arachnologist, I confront our ignorance when I collect spiders in a tropical forest. Typically, half or more of the species I find are new to science. Pictured here is one of the new species I found on a 2010 trip to Ecuador -- this male has bright blue palpi that he shows off to the females.

On the one hand, it's tremendously exciting to find a species new to science every day you look. On the other hand, it's depressing to think how much work remains. And only a few of us are doing it.

And so, Borneo's forests await.

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Introduction

Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY)

Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.

More by Wayne Maddison

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