Scientists have said they are “completely stunned” after discovering a new species of spider.<\/p>\n
A team from Jersey’s Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust was working with partners on the Mauritian island of Ilot Vacoas when the arachnid was spotted along a stretch of rock along the coast in 2023.<\/p>\n
The charity said the discovery was confirmed as a new species of trapdoor spider which was named the Mauritian tidal trapdoor spider (Idioctis marevallum).<\/p>\n
Dr Max Tercel, the entomologist who found the spider, said it felt like uncovering a “hidden treasure”.<\/p>\n
Recalling the discovery, Tercel said he found the spider on “a stretch of coastal rock with sparse vegetation”.<\/p>\n
It was “not somewhere we expected to find something so remarkable”, he said.<\/p>\n
“It was dark by then and I was carefully searching through crevices with my head torch when, to my astonishment, I noticed a familiar pattern – a spider’s legs extending from its burrow, something I’d only ever seen before in lush forests and grasslands,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I was completely stunned.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have said they are “completely stunned” after discovering a new species of spider. A team from Jersey’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819642,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-819641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819641\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}