Dead scientist's 'time capsule' in vault key to resurrecting Aussie species
Each tiny glass vial contains a trapdoor spider, and all of them were collected by one woman. Many of the species are now locally extinct from the sprawling Wheatbelt region that surrounds Perth.
Spider expert Dr Mark Harvey, who is leading a project at Western Australian Museum, to digitise the collection, describes it as a 'time capsule'. By understanding which spiders were present at any given location, scientists are able to form a picture of what the wider ecosystem once looked like before it was replaced with crops of wheat and canola, or grassy paddocks for raising livestock.
For instance, the shield-backed trapdoor spider (Idiosoma nigrum) preferred to live in woodland that was fairly flat and not very dense. And this same specific type of landscape would have also been home to many of the small mammals that are now locally extinct.
When the shield-backed trapdoor spider was collected in the 1950s, the species was considered abundant on the Wheatbelt. Today it survives in a few small fragments of bushland that were retained in the region.
'Once they've been lost from an area, because the native habitat is a patchwork, and no longer connected, they can't move from one place to another to recolonise,' Harvey said.
'Trapdoor spiders are very bad at that at the best of times, because the spiderlings come out of the mother's burrow, they might only walk one, two or three metres before they start their own. And that's where they spend the rest of their lives — so they don't disperse like other animals do.'
Related: Major weather event prompts behavioural change in Wheatbelt wildlife
A healthy ecosystem in southwest Australia has 10 to 15 species of trapdoor spider, so when researchers return to an area and only find two or three, they know localised extinctions have occurred and the landscape has been degraded.
Woman watched as entire region transformed
The spiders were all collected by Dr Barbara York Main, known as Australia's spider lady, who died in 2019. She was born in 1929 and grew up in the Wheatbelt, giving her a front seat to watch the dramatic change that occurred over her lifetime.
The collection contains a number of species that are yet to be officially described or named by scientists.
By digitising her collection, the data will become available to scientists around the world, and the general public through the Atlas of Living Australia and WA's Dandjoo statewide biodiversity data platform.
In 2025, the impact of habitat destruction on native species is well-known, but several species of trapdoor spider are barely surviving the ongoing threats to their range. The Euoplos dignitas in Queensland's Brigalow Belt was only identified in 2023, and it's already endangered. It survives in a heavily fragmented 1850 square kilometre area that successive state governments have allowed to be cleared for cattle grazing and crops.
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Spider DNA could help resurrect species
Harvey is hopeful that in the future, as DNA technology improves, it could be possible to resurrect trapdoor spiders using genetic material from the collection.
But even if de-extinction is not possible, it might be possible to help fragmented populations of spiders, that have become genetically compromised as their numbers have shrunk.
'We could use those specimens taken from when they were fairly widespread species across the landscape, look at its genetic variation, and then compare it to the modern examples we might find now. When the populations have shrunk in size, and we can see what sort of genetic variation is lacking,' Harvey said.
'We might be able to do something about it with gene splicing.'
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