I have to admit I don’t know much about spiders except that they’re mostly creepy and gross. The only spiders I’ve really had in any interest in are the Nelson Cave Spiders and even then I wouldn’t want to get too close to one (unless I’m trying to get a macro photo). So you can imagine how stoked (or not) I was when Tamzin pointed out a large spider she hadn’t seen before in an abandoned mine shaft at Waikakaho. I was really only there to photograph the mine shafts (DOC if you’re reading this from the outside only 😉 )and hopefully get a cool shot or two.
On the way out of the mine shaft for the sake of a photo I forced myself to have a closer look.The first thing that struck me was that it didn’t look like any of the large spiders I knew, except maybe the Northwest Nelson Cave Spider. However I could tell from its mouth it wasn’t a cave spider. At the time Tamzin and I were joking about how awesome it would be if it was a new species and if it was what we’d name it.
Arriving home I uploaded all my nature photos to http://www.naturewatch.org.nz as well as sending the unknown spider to expert macro photographer Bryce McQuillan. Byrce shot back saying it was certainly interesting and that it could possibly be a spider called Pianoa isolata. A bit of google research and pretty soon I was looking a photo of something close to the spider in my photo – mystery solved.
Well actually no! It turns out Pianoa isolata is only known from a few sites in Southland and South Otago. It was at this point Cor Vink from Canterbury Museum’s Natural History Department contacted me. Somewhat fortuitously he was heading up to the Nelson area with a couple of colleagues from overseas to look at spiders in the family Granduale (the same family as the Nelson Cave Spider and Pianoa isolata). It took me all of about a second to realise this could turn into one hell of a fun adventure so I volunteered both myself and Tamzin as guides.
On the morning of our big adventure the rain started coming down heavily and a roaring southerly brought the temperature down further. By the time we made our way to Waikakaho and began the walk conditions had improved to only being overcast. After an hour or so of hard up hill slog we found ourselves at the abandoned mine shaft and started the hunt for a new species of spider!
No matter how hard we looked we couldn’t find the large spider we had seen a few weeks ago. Our luck changed when we found a dead spider, not long after Cor found a very much alive but small juvenile spider further down the mine shaft. Although not the fully grown male and female we were after it was at least enough to get a DNA sample so that Cor can figure out exactly how different these spiders are.
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