neville parkfeeling a little relieved about never identifying any dictynid to genus as the whole family's been overhauled: https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlaf007
people! i'm gonna actually make an #Arachnews blog post. Got any recent-ish arachnid photos/art you want to show off and will give me permission to use? I would like to add it to the post! Just let me know how you'd like to be credited.
#arachnid #arachnids #spider #spiders #SpidersOfMastodon #bugstodon
New Deep Look video is about _Tetragnatha_ mating! Great footage: https://youtu.be/-CqBIjhpL0Q
#Arachnews #spiders #SpiderSex #nsfw (unless you work as an arachnologist I guess)
For Long-Jawed Spiders, Love Is a Battlefield | Deep Look
the nerds are at it again
a new species of ghost spider (family Anyphaenidae) from Brazil's Atlantic forest has been named _Eldar galadrielae_ (the Eldar are the Elves in LotR)
paper: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-025-01982-4 
// PDF free if you have an account at the World Spider Catalog: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/reference/18403
#Arachnews #arachnology #spiders #SpidersOfMastodon #taxonomy #brasil
New research from the Hebets Lab at University of Nebraska Lincoln: _Agelenopsis_ grass spiders in noisy urban environments weave webs with built-in noise dampening—as opposed to their rural cousins, who built more sensitive webs when researchers turned up the volume.
From the NYT article linked below:
> “While animal sensory systems can, and do, certainly adapt over evolutionary time to changing environmental conditions, this takes time,” Dr. Hebets said. “Behavioral changes, however, can be immediate.”
This offers an intriguing tangent: webs are part of a spider's sensory apparatus but are constantly re-built, and behavioural plasticity lets them "evolve" much faster—an evolution you can't track by looking at physical traits alone.
Anecdotally, _Agelenopsis_ are masters at adapting their flat sheet webs to even the unlikeliest urban environments! So it's not a surprise they are adaptable in other ways as well.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.041
NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/22/science/spiders-webs-noise-pollution.html // https://archive.ph/Mu7KJ
I did not expect to read the phrase "males have terminal nuptial gift sacs on their penises" today but here we are
A delightful paper comparing mating behaviour across _Leiobunum_ harvester species which have, or lack, nuptial gift-giving, out of Mercedes Burns' lab at the University of Maryland Baltimore County: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2025.123150 
#OpenAccess #Arachnews #arachnids #Opiliones #Sclerosomatidae
#Arachnews: Ximena Nelson, a specialist in spider behaviour (particularly jumping spiders), has a book out! _The Lives of Spiders: A Natural History of the World's Spiders_, from Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691255026/the-lives-of-spiders
Review in the New Yorker, if you can stand the overwhelmingly self-indulgent "oooh spiders are so icky and scary" tone: https://archive.ph/XqdhD
> As of 2025, there are over 52,000 species of spider known in our plane of existence (World Spider Catalog, 2025), with many more awaiting discovery. This does not take into account spiders that may exist in other planes of existence, which, until now, have never been studied.
It's a bit early but this is quite possibly the best arachnid paper I've read, and will read, all year: Marc Milne & Shahan Derkarabetian construct a phylogenetic tree of arachnids in Magic: The Gathering.
If you don't know much about MtG, arachnids, or how biologists classify species, you'll definitely learn something from this paper!
Uhhhhh holy shit no one told me _Dolomedes_ & co. got moved from Pisauridae to their own family, Dolomedidae? https://wsc.nmbe.ch/family/158/Dolomedidae
Morris, Hazzi & Hormiga 2025: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ympev.2024.108247
If you have a WSC account you can get the PDF here: https://wsc.nmbe.ch/reference/18059
#Arachnews #phylogeny #taxonomy #arachnology #arachnids #spiders
#Arachnews: folks at Gabriele Uhl's lab have discovered that male wasp spiders (_Argiope bruennichi_) have special sensory organs, called wall-pore sensilla, on their legs which they use to smell females' airborne pheromones. They also found wall-pore sensilla in other adult male spiders, and evidence suggests they evolved independently across the spider tree of life. Many questions still remain about spider smell!
📰 https://theconversation.com/spiders-smell-with-their-legs-new-research-246691
📄 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2415468121
