Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland

"When I was working at Sherwood, members of the [British Arachnological] Society came up to do some survey work. They found some interesting things and came back again a couple years later. Mike was secretary of the Society at the time, and he was producing this book. He lived in Sheffield, so not all that far away and we would set up field visits. We spent time within the woods and also an area of heathland to the north of us. Then we went back to Mike’s place in Sheffield to identify what we’d found. He was actually doing work on these plates at the time and I saw him working on some of the originals. He was there with a specimen, painting it as he was saw it through the microscope. So I have a certain affinity with Mike. Some of the illustrations are fantastic. “There is a great fellowship amongst not only British but also European arachnologists.” Eventually, the three volumes were produced. It has, again, detailed illustrations of all the genitalia, which is what we look at with the microscope. His descriptions are not always as full as they would be in Locket and Millidge, because he’s referring to the plates all the time—you can actually see the things, so you don’t need to describe them. That does mean you’re swapping between the books all the time, which can be a little bit time consuming. The illustrations show what you see under the microscope, but you’ve got to remember that you’ve got to get it in exactly the right position. If you’re out by a couple of degrees, you’ll be looking at a different thing altogether. It’s not easy. Not really. It’s been suggested a number of times but it would be a huge task. One problem is that there’s such a variety, even with the garden spider, which people come across all the time. You know it is a garden spider because of the white markings on the abdomen, but it comes in such a range of sizes and colours—you can get very pale, yellowy green ones, you can get dark, chocolate brown ones, and everything in between. While you can recognize a spider fairly easily, even if you take out all the linyphiids, you’re still talking about around 400 different species. Trying to work out an app to key those down so you can recognise them is not going to be easy. One issue we’re experiencing with iSpot and iRecord—where people send in photographs—is that they say, ‘I found this, and it’s so-and-so.’ And we know that it isn’t. They just haven’t been able to use the ID process sufficiently well to be able to do that. It would be hard to make an app where you’d be sure you were getting correct information at the end of the process. Yes. But you’ve got to be careful. You can still make mistakes. If you’ve got a rare one and say, ‘Oh yes, it’s that.’ I’ve done that once or twice. I haven’t been entirely certain, so it’s gone off to an expert. Then they say, ‘Well, no, it actually isn’t that. It’s something else.’ A classic example of that is something called Meta bourneti. This was found up at Sherwood when I was working there. It was a male I found and I didn’t know what it was. I just found a big, dark, glossy brown spider sitting in a web on the eaves of one of the buildings of the visitor centre. I rung up John—who was the guy who was mentoring me and doing all the ID work. I told him I had found something interesting and described it. He said, ‘Oh, it sounds like Meta menardi. Let me have a look at it.’ So I put it in a tube and I sent it off to him, and he came back to me and said, ‘Yes, it’s menardi. Nice record. First one that we’ve had for the site.’ Meanwhile Mike, who was still working on these books, wanted menardi to do an illustration. So John sent it up to him, and the response we heard back from Mike was, ‘It’s not menardi, it’s bourneti.’ We then got really quite excited, because bourneti was known as a cave dwelling spider. It was about the sixth or seventh time it had been found in the UK. What on earth was it doing at the visitor centre at Sherwood Forest? We surmised that it might be living in some ancient oak trees, these hollow trees which are dark and damp, with a bit of space where it could spin a big web. Then, after I moved to Oxfordshire—sometime in the last 10 years or so—they did some work on the visitor centre, with underground cables and drainage. They lifted one of the manhole covers and found a colony of Meta bourneti sitting in its correct habitat in a dark, damp underground situation. That’s obviously where it had come from, but because we didn’t have that information, we were making all sorts of assumptions. So that’s what happens. The book shows you how you can tell the difference between the two, but you’ve still got to have the experience. It is becoming a golden age, not only from that point of view, but from the point of view of people using social media. There are a couple of excellent photographers who know what they’re doing and some of the images that are coming up on Twitter are absolutely amazing. We were very fortunate, with our book , in getting lots of images from members of the Society in the UK. Then I came to a point where I wasn’t getting images of some of the spiders that are quite rare in the UK, so I was going to the Continent where those species are commoner. I had the same response from photographers in Germany, France, Hungary, Denmark and all over the place. The generosity of people in providing us with lots of images in some cases—and all they got in response was a copy of the book. There is a great fellowship amongst not only British but also European arachnologists. I was at a European arachnology congress in Nottingham , which is a two-yearly affair with people from all over the place. What was interesting is that there are far more people doing postgraduate research in Europe than there are in the UK. There used to be more, but there is less and less happening at that level of academia than there used to be—simply because there’s no money in it. It’s a shame. One of the only things that does happen—or at least one of the main things—is DNA research into spiders. It does, usually, have to have some sort of practical use at the end of it to get funding. This is the big problem. It’ll be interesting to see how things proceed and develop. Certainly not the teenagers. There are some younger people coming in. We’ve got about three or 400 members and a couple of hundred foreign members. It’s remained fairly static ever since I’ve been involved. As a Society, we are represented at the Birdfair , for instance. That’s a fairly new thing for us—the past five years. We’re one of the busiest stands on the show for three days. It is crazy. We don’t stop, basically. We do get members there. I also usually go down, with a few people, to the Amateur Entomologists’ Society exhibition every year at Kempton Park. Again, it’s getting our face out to the public. We’d like to do more of those, but we don’t have enough people to spend the time doing it, which is a big issue. It’s something we’re continuing trying to push."