This Jurassic-era relic has survived 150 million years on Earth – now it's one big fire from extinction
The critically endangered Kangaroo Island assassin spider's only known home is in the north-west of the island, where this Jurassic-era spider hides out in moist clumps of leaf litter.
In more than a month of searches, and with just a couple more weeks to go, Ogilvie and a few helpers have only found one tiny juvenile.
'We get so excited when we find a good area but then it's deflating. Everything is so dry – it's hardly rained for two years,' says Ogilvie, a conservation biologist working with the charity Invertebrates Australia.
Last year, scientists found just one mature female and six juveniles at six locations, all in a 20 sq kilometre-area that includes a block of land owned by mining billionaire Andrew Forrest.
Those same locations have come up blank this year. The spiders need the moist microclimate of the leaf litter to survive, but there's a trifecta of threats drying out their habitat and pushing them ever closer to extinction.
The spider's last remaining bolthole has been through near-record drought over the last 18 months, with rainfall among the lowest on record since 1900.
The black summer bushfires burned through large areas of potential habitat that have not yet recovered, and an invasive plant root disease – known as phytophthora – is damaging the forest canopy and the plants that hold some of the leaf litter where the spiders live, drying out the habitat even further.
'If we look at the risks and be realistic, they're potentially one big fire away from extinction,' says Dr Michael Rix, the principal scientist and curator of arachnology at Queensland Museum, who collected the first specimens of the spider and, with scientific colleague Mark Harvey, formally described them.
'By all objective measures, its existence is phenomenally precarious.'
The Kangaroo Island assassin spider is one of 11 invertebrates on the federal government's priority list of threatened species.
The assassin family of spiders – which get their name from their habit of slowly stalking and then eating other spiders – are found only in Australia, Madagascar and parts of southern Africa.
Kangaroo Island's assassin was found in 2010 by Rix, who, along with Harvey, has described 37 of Australia's 41 assassin spiders.
'We collect this suspended leaf litter and shake it. The spiders close their legs and they drop down. I looked in the tray to see what's there – I knew it was undescribed. It was one of the really memorable moments of my field biology career. Very exciting,' he remembers.
Rix says they have the most unusual appearance of any spider, with 'incredible elevated heads and long spear-like mouth parts'.
'They're unmistakeable,' he says. 'They're an early branch in the spider's tree of life. Assassin spiders are ancient and those around today are survivors of 150m years of life on Earth.
'They were only known as fossils before any living ones were found in Madagascar in the 19th century.'
Sign up to Breaking News Australia
Get the most important news as it breaks
after newsletter promotion
Kangaroo Island's species was feared extinct after bushfires swept across the west of the island in the black summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 until Dr Jess Marsh, a research fellow at the University of Adelaide and an invertebrate conservation biologist based on the island, found two specimens in 2021 in a small patch of unburned vegetation.
'It's being squeezed into smaller and smaller areas,' says Marsh. 'Each survey we do is increasing our confidence that its restricted to this patch of vegetation, and nowhere else.'
Marsh and colleagues are now discussing the idea of establishing a breeding program for the spiders in a zoo, creating an 'insurance population' – but removing individuals from the wild carries clear risks that Marsh says wouldn't be taken lightly.
'They've survived mass extinction events and past climate changes – a huge amount. Now in this short period of time, it's humans that are really testing them.'
Rix says the precarious situation the spiders find themselves in is part of a much bigger wave of largely unseen extinctions of invertebrates.
Officially, Australia lists only one invertebrate as extinct – the Lake Pedder earthworm.
But last year, Rix, Marsh and colleagues released research that estimated that since the European invasion of Australia, about 9,000 invertebrates had likely suffered a so-called ghost extinction – 'the loss of undiscovered species that have left no trace.'
'Some people might say, 'who cares about a tiny spider going extinct'?' says Rix. 'But this is part of the quantum of invertebrate extinctions that we're experiencing right now. This might be a problem that creeps up on us.
'There's a concept of conserving evolutionary significant units – retaining diversity that speaks deeply to Earth's evolutionary history. That is what these spiders are – a window into the past. They're survivors. Trying to conserve them is so important.'
Marsh and Rix were the only two people to have ever found a Kangaroo Island assassin spider, until this week's discovery – not by a scientist, but an enthusiastic 17-year-old volunteer called Jack Wilson who was filling his time during school holidays.
'It was probably my 10th sieve of the day,' he says.
'They can look like little blobs of dirt, but it's the big neck that gives them away. I'm pretty chuffed. It's crazy.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Sky News
a day ago
- Sky News
Chris Hemsworth describes 'gear shift' after learning he's 10 times more likely to get Alzheimer's
Chris Hemsworth has told Sky News that finding out he had a greater chance of developing Alzheimer's disease was a "gear shift" in his life motivations. During a genetic test in season one of Limitless: Live Better Now, the Australian actor discovered that he is, biologically, eight to 10 times more likely than others to have the brain disorder during his lifetime as he carries two copies of the APOE4 gene. He had first taken part in the National Geographic show to be its "guinea pig" and face new experiences that challenge the body and mind. But after having the test, the 41-year-old Thor, Furiosa and Transformers star was faced with an unexpected truth. One in every 50 people inherit two copies of the APOE4 gene and research has found that nearly all double carriers showed key early signs of the disease which causes dementia by the age of 55. Everyone's risk is different, and evidence suggests there are things you can do to reduce your risk whether you're a carrier of the gene or not, including not smoking, reducing alcohol intake, daily exercise, monitoring cholesterol and blood pressure and eating a balanced diet. Speaking of when he found out he was a double carrier, Hemsworth told Sky News: "It was just kind of this point in my life where up until your 40s, you're kind of gathering data and information and it's all reactionary and then you get to a point where you think, oh some of this sort of identity that I've sort of built doesn't hold true anymore. "There's some inner sort of protest or inner voice that has a deeper need to understand and there's deeper questions and what is the purpose and the why behind what I'm doing ... and what am I seeking, what am I contributing, as opposed to just what I am collecting." Reacting on screen, he said it made him shift his focus to living better and increase the chances of him spending as much time as possible with his family and friends. What's changed in the second series? The change in mindset is evident in season two. "This time around, I was very involved in the orchestration and the sort of production and bringing together spaces that I was interested in or there was a deep curiosity or were deeply personal to me. And it was more sort of experiential journalism as opposed to a contestant in a challenging kind of fun, reality show. He adds: "I was much more committed or invested in the experience. "And I was a bit more educated on the topics too. I had to research, I had a deeper point of view, I suppose, personally, but also sort of the education I was given prior and I enjoyed that more, to be honest, I didn't like that I felt very uncomfortable in the first season because I was standing around all these experts and I knew nothing about these topics, yet I was kind of asked to speak on them and so I felt like an imposter the entire time." Limitless: Live Better Now looks at the ways in which you can improve your brain and body's health through endurance challenges and learning a new instrument. Teaming up with Sheeran Hemsworth chose the drums and, taking it to the extreme, was set the task of joining his friend Ed Sheeran on stage to play Thinking Out Loud. "That fear and that anxiety was incredibly overwhelming," Hemsworth says, detailing how he felt "underwater" in the weeks leading up to the event. "It's weird the way intense situations actually cause a hyper focus; it's a survival mechanism of the brain. "Some of the other challenges where if I did the training it was beneficial, but I could kind of muscle my way through it. You can't do that with a musical instrument and then the realisation that the entire band is relying on you to keep time. And then 70,000 people are sitting there going, 'please don't wreck our favourite song'." Reflecting on the moment, he says it's one of the most magical feelings he's ever had. "The joy was unlike anything I've ever experienced. You know, if you could bottle that and have it in a healthy way and not have all the negatives that someone may have for it, it was amazing. It was a true kind of one of my first probably proper out of body experiences, I suppose. "It was like, I kind of remember being in the out, looking down at myself almost, kind of going, wow, I'm kind of floating along with this thing that's so much bigger than me and I'm in true sort of flow state with it."
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
‘Alien is a warning, isn't it?': Essie Davis on Alien: Earth and Tasmania's ecological crisis
Essie Davis didn't watch much horror growing up in Tasmania; the 55-year-old actor can still bitterly recall the moment when, aged four, she was left at home while her older siblings went to see Jaws at the local cinema in Hobart. 'I stood by the back door going, 'I will remember this day for the rest of my life!'' Davis recalls, speaking from her current family home, also in Tasmania. She finally saw the film on VHS years later, while dating a production designer she had met while performing at Belvoir St theatre. That designer was Justin Kurzel, now one of Australia's most celebrated directors – and also her husband. Back in the mid-90s, Kurzel's courtship rituals included a crash course in horror classics – Jaws was high on the list, followed closely by Ridley Scott's 1979 space slasher Alien. 'I love that first Alien film so much, I wish I'd seen it in a cinema,' Davis says. 'They're definitely a huge part of my film psyche.' It would take another few decades before Davis entered the Alien universe herself, in a new prequel series set shortly before the original film. Alien: Earth focuses on Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a 'forever girl' whose consciousness is transferred from her terminally ill human body to a synthetic one, making her a world-first 'hybrid'. Davis plays Dame Sylvia, one of the scientists responsible for Wendy's second life. In one of many allusions to Peter Pan, Hawley named the character after Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, the real-life mother of the boys who inspired JM Barrie to write his Neverland saga. The show's themes – and Sylvia's attempts to balance Wendy's humanity with her new, artificial immortality – felt particularly timely to Davis. 'AI was a thing that was coming, but it wasn't suddenly upon us,' she says. 'And then we had the writers' strike and the actors' strike, and then ChatGPT suddenly was in the schools in Tasmania, and I was just going, 'hang on a minute'. 'There's a tightrope of ethics and morality, and everyone has a different version of it. I really hope that people will enjoy this and get hooked into that quandary of genetic engineering and ethics and that strange quest to own everything and beat everyone and be younger than anyone.' Davis is a horror icon herself, thanks to a breakout role in Jennifer Kent's 2014 film The Babadook. The low-budget Australian production became a global hit, with fans including The Exorcist director William Friedkin, who placed the film alongside Alien as one of the scariest films he had ever seen. It remains a modern cult classic 10 years later. 'I remember watching a screening way before it was released, and just went, 'Oh, this is great, but it's not scary',' she says. 'And then we went to the Sundance film festival, and I sat up the back as people swore and leapt out of their seats.' Davis credits the film's enduring appeal – its top-hatted spook has even been embraced as an unlikely Queer icon – to something deeper than jump scares. 'It's not just a horror film,' she says. 'It's in fact a kind of psychological thriller about mental health and grief and parenting and love.' It remains a defining role for Davis, alongside her star turn in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries – the 1920s detective franchise that ran for three series and a film, based on the novels of Kerry Greenwood, who died in April. 'A terrible loss, but she's forever in us now,' says Davis. 'I was crying, working out whether I should do it or not,' she adds, of donning Phryne Fisher's signature black bob. 'I'm really glad I did, because that character was such a positive force, and it's just so fun to play someone so clever and positive and naughty and irreverent – and someone who really cares about social justice, and is not going to bow for anyone, and stands up for the underdog.' Along with roles in Game of Thrones, Baby Teeth and Netflix's One Day, Davis has also collaborated with her film-maker husband, responsible for films including Snowtown, Nitram, and television adaptations of Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang and most recently Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Davis appeared in the latter three. Their kids were old enough to be watching Alien for a high school English class when the script for Alien: Earth hit Davis's inbox; the series is led by Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the award-winning small-screen adaptation of Fargo. She was intrigued; the show's depiction of a future Earth carved up and controlled by mega-corporations – Dame Sylvia is employed by Prodigy, a rival to the franchise's longstanding faceless villains, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation – particularly resonated with her. 'It's terribly prescient – the richest of corporations and the richest people taking over the world, essentially running the world,' she says. For Davis, the perils of corporate profits have been plain to see from her home in Tasmania, where she and Kurzel returned to raise their family. 'It is terrifying what is happening to our beautiful place here in Tassie, and the total corporate capture of our government by big industry,' she says of the controversy around the state's fish farming industry, of which she has become one of many high-profile critics, alongside Richard Flanagan and former ABC journalist turned political candidate Peter George. These days, Davis doesn't have to go to the cinema to witness coastal dread. 'When you look out over the water from Bruny Island, everywhere you look you see rows and rows of fish pens, and huge, industrial factory ships,' she says. 'We had mass fish mortalities, rotting salmon washing up on our beaches. And 53 cormorants got shot because they were fishing out of the pens.' Davis says the public opposition to such practices 'began as lots of individuals around Tasmania making constructive criticism, and asking for a bit of negotiation on pollution'. It was being ignored by salmon companies and successive governments, she says, that connected and galvanised the far-flung island community. What began as a movement, Davis says, has now become an 'insurrection', evident in the rise of Peter George, who was elected to Tasmania's state parliament as an independent days after our interview. 'But we're not going to stop,' she says. 'We're just going to keep on until we have people representing the people of Tasmania and not just corporations and party politics. 'I guess Alien is a warning, isn't it?' she adds. 'A warning of what greed and money and this kind of pursuit of immortality can do to a planet.' Alien: Earth launches on Disney+ on 12 August in Australia and the US and on 13 August in the UK
The Guardian
a day ago
- The Guardian
A burning issue: why it's time to ditch the wood-fired heater and opt for eco alternatives
There's something romantic about sitting by an open fireplace in winter time. But there's growing evidence of the damage wood-fired heaters and open fires are doing to our health – and the environment. As a group of University of Technology Sydney academics recently put it – 'a wood-fired heater is like having a truck idling in your living room all day (albeit with the bulk of the emissions escaping via the chimney)'. So what do we know about wood burning and are there alternatives for those wanting a cosy open-fire feel in their home without damaging the Earth? According to a 2024 study, wood burning in fireplaces and heaters is one of the biggest sources of air pollution in many parts of Australia. While only about 10% of Australian homes use wood burning as their primary heat source, they create more than half of Australia's fine particulate pollution. The health costs of this are bad enough, but the effect on the planet is also significant. Even so-called eco friendly wood heaters are doing damage - producing more particulate pollution than a modern truck. That's because burning firewood in fireplaces and domestic heaters produces methane and black carbon particles that worsen global heating. One study estimates that wood heaters cause as much or more emissions than gas or reverse-cycle air conditioning. On top of that, much of the firewood sold in urban areas comes from forest timber – further depleting essential carbon banks. Lisa Cunial is a psychologist who has lived in Orange in NSW for more than 20 years. She says Orange is cold for seven months of the year and a lot of people use wood-burning heaters in their homes. 'Being quite a major regional city, it's a real problem.' After the 2019 bushfires, Cunial ended up in hospital with severe breathing difficulties. 'Wood is very much part of the culture here. But for me it means I literally have to stay inside the house with air filters even though I live near bushland and a wetland,' she says. Fay Johnston, the director of the Centre for Safe Air and professor of environmental epidemiology at the University of Tasmania's Menzies Institute for Medical Research recently created a wood heater pollution map showing which parts of Australia are estimated to have the most severe air pollution from wood heaters. 'When people think of pollution they often picture smokestacks, vehicle exhaust and coal-fired power stations, but wood heaters pollute more fine particulate matter into the air we breathe than any of these sources,' she says. Johnston also points to the impact of firewood collection on Australia's forests and habitat. 'One study estimated that, if we stopped burning wood and clearing forest for heating, Australia would reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions by 8.7m tonnes each year, about one-fifth of Australia's car emissions. According to Arabella Daniel, a Melbourne inner-city councillor and clean air community advocate who runs My Air Quality Australia, in the absence of strong public health or climate messaging, wood heating is wrongly seen as desirable and natural. 'That lifestyle image is pushed, but the health [and environmental] impacts are ignored,' she says. Wood heaters are sold cheaply with no warnings, despite evidence of serious environmental harm. 'Burning wood is normalised, yet it worsens air pollution and contributes to climate change. Harvesting firewood damages biodiversity and depletes forests.' She says now is the time for the Australian government to recognise wood heater pollution as a serious public health and climate issue, and to provide subsidies to phase them out over time, beginning with stopping new wood heater installations. 'Providing financial support to help people switch to clean, efficient, electric alternatives is cost effective. Public education is vital – people need to understand the health risks and the benefits of going electric. Such government action is already happening with getting off gas – we need to get off wood too.' Johnston agrees, saying it's time for governments to restrict the installation of new wood heaters in high-density residential areas where people will be affected by smoke pollution. 'Point-of-sale legislation should be introduced requiring wood heaters to be replaced with non-polluting electric alternatives before a property changes hands.' She says while we have sophisticated systems in place for food and water standards, 'the problem of wood heaters has persisted because no environment or health authority in Australia sees themselves as bearing primary responsibility' for it. While there are some wood burning heaters that produce less emissions than others, including this ultra-low emission model developed in New Zealand, Daniel says the emissions from those models may still be too high to be safe for health or the climate. 'Those models were tested on NZ softwoods and not Australian hardwoods so the emissions will be greater here. All of these models still emit climate pollution and threaten our forests. We know the best alternative is for clean, electric split systems.' She says for those who want the cozy appearance of a roaring fire in their homes without the climate impacts, the best option is an electric fireplace. There are plenty of different kinds of systems on the market that offer the appearance of a warm glowing flame but without any emissions. These might not have the same romantic feel as wood, but you'll be doing the climate – and your health – a favour.
