[Fagilde trapdoor spider (Nemesia berlandi) moving in earth towards excavated burrow, walking inside]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “Well, this is an important rediscovery of a species because it hadn’t been seen in so long. And if a species isn’t found, if we don’t know if it even exists. there’s nothing we can do about protecting it. So it is a first step. It is the main step, really, to do any conservation action is to know that the species is still in existence. If it was gone, there was nothing we could do. So it brings us hope towards what can we do next to ensure it keeps alive and it keeps thriving 100 years from now.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “So it’s common name in local people, it’s the ‘Fagilde trapdoor spider,’ Buraqueira-de-Fagilde in its Portuguese language. But the ‘tap dancing’ spider comes because when males live in their burrows and so do juveniles and so do females, they live underground for years. In the case of females, for decades even, as far as we know. But the males do have to come out at some point for mating. So they come out of their burrows and they go to the females’ burrows and they have to announce and tell the female that they are not food, basically. So the way that this group of species have developed that communication skill is they will gently tap on the soil and the trapdoor itself of the female. And it’s that music, that drumming, that song, that tap dancing, as it was called, that tells the female, I’m not food, I might be a very nice partner, would you like to hang out and go on a date? And if the female then likes that music and if that song is the right song, she will then open the door. And if all goes well, the two will mate and the next generations of trapdoor spiders are born.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider burrows (holes)]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “I would never describe a trapdoor as common, they are often more numerous, but they’re all quite rare. Because they don’t move much, like I said, they live in their burrow, so they tend to isolate themselves geographically, meaning they have restricted range, they live in a very small area. Usually. This in particular has, as far as we know, has a really small range. So we looked at central Portugal, central northern Portugal, and all the other spiders nearby or close by, relatively close by to human standards. We did DNA analysis on those. And as we looked at the DNA inside their cells and we compared the ones from Fagilde with ones relatively close by, they are more distinct from each other than we are from chimps. So that’s the kind of difference we’re talking about. They’re very different. We think most of them, if not all of them, will do tap dancing. What will vary is what that dance is, so the females of each species might have a different dance to recognize each other. Because sometimes they can coexist. A single place can have 2 to 3 species, maybe more, of trapdoors. And so the females need a way to know that it’s the right male knocking and the males need to know they’re knocking at the right female because if they’re wrong, they’re knocking at the species that is not their own species, they might end up as a meal. So there’s a lot of pressure for them to get that dance right. The stakes are very high in the tap dancing world of spiders.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider on moss]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “For other (trapdoor spider) species, when the males are very eager to mate, they are so eager and the soil is so (inaudible), that if you are very close, you can literally hear the (bangs on table top) thump on the soil, it’s audible by humans. But this species, as I said, it’s very small. We haven’t really seen the males, so we don’t know how audible it is. But there are tools that can convert, amplify, let’s say, those vibrations into more audible, clear sounds. So, yes, it’s possible that with the right tools at the right timing, when they’re mating, we could turn it into actual sound (that) people could see and interpret.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider in earth outside excavated burrow]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “So we don’t know what they eat because we rarely see it. We don’t know what eats it, because we haven’t studied that and we haven’t had the resources to do it. But we do know that whatever role it’s playing, it’s there for a long time and it’s unique to that ecosystem and it’s part of that. It’s survived this far and it has value for us and for our ecosystem. And if we were to lose it, we have no idea of what consequences would come. But I don’t think ignorance is an excuse to allow something to disappear or to allow for an ecosystem to collapse because we don’t understand exactly what it does.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider on moss]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “So the first person I would say to react to that discovery was myself. As in I was in the field, I saw it, I know what I was seeing, and I held it in my hand after a hundred years. There’s no feeling like it. It’s akin to having a child. It’s akin to finding a lost family member. It is something I missed and was part of my heritage, it’s part of my cultural background. It’s something that I was now responsible for sharing. The burden of that, even though it’s a tiny spider in my fairly large hand, the weight of that responsibility and the privilege of that is immense. And it’s definitely one of the highlights of my career so far. I don’t think, very few things can beat that. There is also the rediscovery side from the local people there. So Fagilde as any small village around the world often gets portrayed in the news always for bad reasons, something bad has to happen for them to make the news. And I think that’s not fair. They work very hard. They sacrificed a lot to protect those forests. They protect it every day, they care for it, they’re really good people and I think they should be highlighted for what makes them unique in a positive light. So I think the rediscovery for them had a very different connotation. And to be fair, they kind of, they weren’t very surprised by it. If you go anywhere and tell them they have something unique, people go, ‘Oh, that’s amazing.’ They weren’t surprised. They know that what they have is unique and special. They’ve seen things that they haven’t seen anywhere, so they know that what they have was valuable. But I think for them what’s important is that people like myself and others validate that and show them that, yes, what you do is special and thank you for all you’ve done to protect it.”
[Fagilde trapdoor spider moving in earth towards excavated burrow, walking inside]
Sergio Henriques (interview): “And I hope that as we do this, it brings that sort of work to other researchers, other people elsewhere to thinking that it does matter, that having this kind of work isn’t pointless, isn’t nobody will notice. Because, look, the media is covering. People often think there’s no point, nobody will care. No, people will care if you tell the story right. People will care about an animal that hasn’t been seen in 100 years, even if it’s a spider. So I think if you focus on a species that is this unloved, as spiders sadly often are, it brings hope for everything else. Because if you care about spiders, everything else will be a much easier push, in my opinion.”
This script was provided by The Associated Press.