A team of researchers in Australia has discovered a remarkable spider that has adapted to life at the edge of the ocean.
When the tide is out, the spider roams about the beach hunting tiny invertebrates. But when the tide is in, the spider retreats to underwater sanctuaries in barnacle shells or in tiny spaces among corals, rocks or kelp. To breathe, the spider builds air pockets out of silk.
The researchers, associated with Queensland Museum and the University of Hamburg, named the newly discovered species Desis bobmarleyi for the late Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Marley. They were inspired by the song “High Tide or Low Tide,” a lesser-known Bob Marley piece that seems to be cherished by his greatest fans. (Listen in the video below.)
“The song ‘High Tide or Low Tide’ promotes love and friendship through all struggles of life,” wrote the researchers — Barbara Baehr, Robert Raven and Danilo Harms — in an introduction to their paper published in journal Evolutionary Systematics. “It is his music that aided a field trip to Port Douglas in coastal Queensland, Australia, to collect spiders with a highly unique biology.”
It isn’t often that one sees a research paper that delays talking about the science to discuss history and inspiration. In this paper, the team honored not just one person but two. The opening paragraphs of the introduction to the paper need no explanation:
“When Amalie Dietrich travelled from Europe to Australia in 1863, she not only attempted to collect animals and plants for the museum trade, but also sought independence and liberty. A strong-headed and adventurous women by nature, she seized new opportunities and took risks on a then-unexplored continent to elevate herself from poverty and oppression.
“Her life story is that of adventure and also life’s struggles and how to overcome them. The Godeffroy Collection of arachnids, accumulated by her and other explorers over a decade in Australia and the Pacific before the turn of the 20th century, is the primary taxonomic reference for spiders of Australasia and remains highly relevant until today.
“Reggae legend Bob Marley certainly had a different background but shared with Dietrich and other explorers some character traits: adventurous and resilient at heart, he liberated himself and his peers from poverty and hopelessness. He took to music, not nature, but left traces through songs that teach optimism and independence of the mind, rather than hate and passive endurance.”
As for the newly discovered species of spider, the researchers propose the common name “Bob Marley’s Intertidal Spider.” The species belongs in the genus Desis, a group of spiders that are truly marine in nature, having broken ranks with an overwhelming number of terrestrial spiders.
The Godeffroy Collection of spiders is maintained by the Centre of Natural History in Hamburg and contains nearly all of the spiders collected by Amalie Dietrich in her early exploration of Australia. German arachnologists Ludwig Koch and Duke Eduard von Keyserling described the taxonomy of those unusual marine spiders along with other marine spiders collected from Singapore, New Guinea and Sāmoa.
This latest paper revisits intertidal species of Desis by re-examining the Godeffroy Collection, while describing the new species named after Bob Marley. The researchers found two of the newly named spiders on brain coral during an extremely low tide. The reef where they were found often lies under more than 3 feet of water.
The range and distribution of the Bob Marley’s spiders remains unknown, but they have been found in several intertidal zones along the Great Barrier Reef.
Along with the new species, two closely related species of spiders that occupy the “high-tide-or-low-tide habitat” were brought out, examined and described anew.
“Both species have been preserved for more than a century but not been studied in detail since their discovery,” the researchers wrote. “By doing so, we honour those that emancipate themselves from oppression, mental or organisational, and seek freedom and independence.”
