University reveals secrets of 200-year-old spiders

It's an arachnophobe's nightmare: in the bowels of the University of Sydney's Macleay Museum, there are more than 1100 vials of spiders collected in the 19th and 20th centuries.

In a recent free public talk on Wednesday 29 May, arachnologist Helen Smith, Macleay Miklouho-Maclay Fellow 2011-12 at the Macleay Museum and Research Associate at the Australian Museum, took her audience on a journey through the collection, part of the oldest natural history collection in Australia.

Because of the collection's antiquity, the Macleay's spiders come with their fair share of mysteries - why, for example, are small, common spiders underrepresented in the collection when there are so many large spiders? What happened to some important specimens that have gone missing in the collection? Why have we changed the way we collect and store spiders over time?

Now a self-confessed spider nut, one reason Helen actually began studying spiders was to prevent her from developing a fear of them.

"I was always into creepy crawlies, even as a kid, but when I moved to Australia from England I got a little bit freaked by the fact I knew there were things here that were dangerous, but I didn't know what they were," she says.

"So I started looking at spiders as a way of addressing my need to know, because I wasn't prepared to be scared by something that I knew intrinsically I shouldn't be scared of, and that I hadn't been scared of before."

The Macleay's spider collection is significant in the study of Australian natural history, and contains several 'type specimens', which are used as reference specimens when a new species is described.

"It's significant because there's a lot of old material from the very early collectors. There's a big focus on old material collected by the Macleay family and people who collected for them," Helen says.

"You get a story about how people collected and what they were looking for, which is quite different from what we do today in modern collections."

Helen's interest in the Macleay collection started during her PhD, when she had difficulty finding a type specimen needed for her research within the collection. As part of her Macleay Miklouho-Maclay Fellowship, granted by the Macleay Museum, she has now catalogued the entire wet collection to make it more searchable and accessible for future research.

She is also naming a previously undescribed spider she has discovered after the Macleay Museum.

The Macleay Miklouho-Maclay Fellowship is named in honour of the scientific friendship of William John Macleay, for whom the Macleay Museum is named, and Russian biologist and ethnographer Nikolai Nikolaivitch Miklouho-Maclay. The Fellowship is awarded annually for study on the collection within the interests of Miklouho-Maclay and WJ Macleay. Applications for this year's fellowship close on 1 July.

The Fellowship is funded by contributions from a large number of donors in 1988, the centenary year of the Macleay Museum.

Spiders take over flood-affected Wagga

Spiders are on the move in the wake of flooding rains covering most of New South Wales, the ABC reports.

Millions of spiders around Wagga Wagga are heading for higher ground.

Residents taking refuge from flood and spider in the Red Steer pub say you cannot walk down the road without swarms of tiny brown spiders crawling up your legs, and in their escape they have left entire paddocks and trees swathed in silver silk.

Dennis Lane, who lives at Cartwrights Hill in north-east Wagga, says the spectacle has attracted many visitors to the area to take photos.

"It's all silver. It's like snow in the trees. With the wet it's all silk," he said.

"Just down the bottom of the hill from my place, the trees are covered in them. They're just all walking out of the water down the road."

According to spider expert Graham Milledge, the spiders are most likely harmless.

Mr Milledge is collection manager in arachnology at the Australian Museum.

He says the spiders look like wolf spiders.

"It's not possible to say precisely what they are unless we can get some samples and examine them," he said.

"After seeing the photos, they look to me like they might be juvenile wolf spiders.

One way spiders can move around is by what they call ballooning, so they let out lengths of silk in the hope that the wind will catch them and carry them away to another place.

"Wolf spiders are a very common type of spider in open country like that. They're ground-dwelling spiders."

Mr Milledge says the silky layer the spiders are leaving across parts of Wagga Wagga is a product of "ballooning".

"One way spiders can move around is by what they call ballooning, so they let out lengths of silk in the hope that the wind will catch them and carry them away to another place," he said.

"But if there's not enough wind around, what happens is they don't get very far and they all end up in the same place. They'll keep trying and that's why you'll get all that silk."

New species of albino spider found in WA

A new species of trapdoor spider has been found near Northam in Western Australia, identified as a member of the Idiopidae family.

Nicknamed the albino trapdoor spider, it was spotted by Grass Valley resident John Cornish on his back veranda in July.

The white-headed, black and brown-legged spider about the size of a 50-cent piece was captured in a jar and handed to the Northam office of the Department of Environment and Conservation.

Read more here.

Spider bites on the rise

There has been a spike in the number of cases of people being bitten by redback spiders in the Hunter region this year.

Toxicologist at Newcastle's Mater Hospital, Geoff Isbister says funnelweb spider bites are fairly stable with only a handful of reported bites across Sydney and Newcastle this year.

But Doctor Isbister says this year is the worst he has seen for redback spider bites in a long time.

"We're running a trial and we've recruited more patients at the Mater than we have ever," he said.

"So we would have seen 10 cases that required antivenom and treatment here, and you can multiply that by, twice as many that didn't need treatment and we know some people get bitten and don't turn up to hospital.

"We would have seen over 100 (people bitten) in the Hunter region."