An Australian Spider Species That's Been Around For 150 Million Yrs On The Edge Of Extinction - Fire, Drought, Disease
For the last five weeks, Jane Ogilvie has searched a patch of dense shrub shaded by sugar gums on Kangaroo Island in South Australia for a surviving relic from 150m years ago. The only known home of the critically endangered Kangaroo Island assassin spider is in the north-west of the island, where the 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 km 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 [are] realistic, they’re potentially one big fire away from extinction,” says Dr Michael Rix, the principal scientist and curator of arachnology at the Queensland Museum, who collected the first specimens of the spider and, with scientific colleague Mark Harvey, formally described them.
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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jul/18/kangaroo-island-assassin-spiders-critically-endangered-bushfires-habitat-invertebrates