Spiders in Borneo: Lambir Hills

By Wayne Maddison?| April 9, 2012 |??

Share ?Email ?Print

---

We were at Lambir Hills National Park for the last week, without Internet connectivity ? hence the blog going dark. In past decades, doing field work in tropical rainforests always meant being entirely disconnected from the rest of the world. We would reemerge not knowing whether Canada had sunk into the sea.

With fond recollection of those old days, I enjoyed this week?s peaceful isolation. We did appreciate, however, Lambir?s modern perks of electricity, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing.

At Lambir we found many of the same species as we had at Mulu, but some, like these delicate Orthrus, we hadn?t seen before. The female is translucent green, making her almost invisible on the undersides of palm fronds in the forest, where they live. The male is bigger (this is rare in spiders) and sports a striking black head and first pair of legs.

Delicate green female of Orthrus

Male of Orthrus

Now that I?m Internet-reconnected, I?ll have more posts over the next several days.

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Introduction
Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity
Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae
Spiders in Borneo: Team Salticid
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu National Park
Spiders in Borneo: Dreaming about salticid spiders
Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spiders in the forest
Spiders in Borneo: Beating around the bushes
Spiders in Borneo: Spiders in leaf litter
Spiders in Borneo: A Vertical Life
Spiders in Borneo: Leeches and eyeballs
Spiders in Borneo: Breaking News!
Spiders in Borneo: Falling from above
Spiders in Borneo: What I carry
Spiders in Borneo: Entangled and pierced
Spiders in Borneo: Scattered literature
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu wrap-up

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

About the Author: 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??

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

---

---

va tech dan gilbert david stern david stern julian beever appeasement ian stewart