A new species of native jumping spider has been discovered in a Rotorua forest that's been restored by a local tourism company. Photo: Supplied / Bryce McQuillan Photography
A native jumping spider boasting great eyesight and tiny genitalia has been discovered at a Rotorua forest that is being restored.
Rotorua Canopy Tours has been working to make the Dansey Scenic Reserve pest-free for more than a decade.
They are now enjoying the fruits of their labour, with new species being discovered as the old growth forest thrives.
Lincoln University PhD student Kate Curtis found the new species living under rimu bark while hunting for spiders in the Dansey Scenic Reserve in Rotorua over summer.
The forest was part of a years-long restoration project by Rotorua Canopy Tours, and she said it was rich with life and had incredible spider and insect diversity.
She has been studying spiders for about seven years, but wanted to dive into taxonomy or describing new species.
There are an estimated 250 species of jumping spiders in Aotearoa but only 50 of them are described and fewer than 10 can be reliably identified.
"A lot of spiders have complex genitalia and this (species), they're quite simple so it can be quite difficult to tell the difference between species and this is sort of why not much work has been done on them in New Zealand," she said.
Male spiders have genitalia called pedipalps that look like they are holding little boxing gloves near their face.
The females have a hardened plate on the underside of their abdomen.
The male's sperm tube for these jumping spiders was extra small, she said.
"They're really difficult to find in the microscope, they're really really small. You almost have to work at different angles to actually find (it)."
Paapaakiri leap to hunt their prey so they need better eyesight, Curtis said.
"But the flipside of having great eyes when you're a spider is that the genitalia is often simpler and more puny, and their mating rituals more complex.
"For scientists, this makes them harder to categorise than other species, but it doesn't appear to be an issue for the spiders themselves."
The Paapaakiri male spiders have great eyesight, but in the spider world that often means simple, puny genitalia and elaborate mating rituals. Photo: Supplied / Bryce McQuillan Photography
Paapaakiri translates to scaly or flaky bark, a nod to the rimu trees where they make their homes.
"Most other native jumping spiders live in vegetation, leaf litter, under rocks, and even high in the mountain ranges so it was unusual to find one specifically living under the rimu bark," she said.
"The bark could provide a unique protective microhabitat, offering protection from predators and harsh environmental conditions, as well as an ideal site for ambushing prey."
It was her job to look at their structures, photograph, draw, measure and describe all their features so they could be identified in the future.
Rotorua Canopy Tours general manager Paul Button said their work started with a promise their founder made more than a decade ago.
"He went where there was no foliage in the undergrowth, now it was 12 to 14 feet high.
"It's mind-blowing," he said.
"It's emotional how much it has come back. When we first started there wasn't a bird, there wasn't a tweet, and now there are birds everywhere."
For the past three years, the business has done a collaborative research programme looking at invertebrates, setting traps across the different layers of the forest.
So far, they had found 12 species that are new to science.
Button said species like native pseudoscorpions used to struggle, but they were bouncing back.
"They're about three millimetres long. They're through New Zealand's forests, they don't have a poisonous tail, they've got a poisonous sack in their buttocks," he said.
Most of our birds do not have defence mechanisms, but the same could not be said for invertebrates, he said.
"They're hardcore. They're the ones with armour and poison and that's where its kind of like the orcs battling in the scene of Lord of the Rings."
For guests who were not keen on eight legged friends, Button said you would hear about the spiders more than you would see them as they talked about the forest as part of the tours.
He hoped their success would encourage more tourism operators to help restore the environment they work in.
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