Episode 9: New Species—17 of them—of ant-like spiders from the Afrotropical region.

Episode 9: New Species—17 of them—of ant-like spiders from the Afrotropical region.

Ruan Booysen is a Ph.D. student at Free State University in South Africa. He talks to us about his recent paper published on March 4th in Zootaxa! Mr. Booysen and his coauthor, Dr. Charles Haddad, described 17 new species of ant-like spiders, including one with female reproductive structures that look like a smiley face! We talk about the Afrotropical region, how to name 17 different species, and why these spiders hang around with ants to much that they look like them!

The title of the paper is “Revision and molecular phylogeny of the spider genus Micaria Westring, 1851 (Araneae: Gnaphosidae) in the Afrotropical Region.” The paper is in the March 4 issue of Zootaxa:  https://www.mapress.com/j/zt/article/view/zootaxa.4940.1.1 

To learn more about Ruan Booysen, visit him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/booysenruan.

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