Under The Microscope

SPIDERS OF NEW ZEALAND AND THEIR WORLDWIDE KIN, by Ray Forster and Lyn Forster; University of Otago Press, 1999; 270 pp; $79.95

New Zealand has an estimated 2,500 species of spider which live almost everywhere from 3,000 metres in the mountains of the Southern Alps to tidally submerged habitats along the coastline. Our homes are often their homes and most of us are probably never more than a metre or two from a spider throughout our lives.

New Zealand's diverse arachnid fauna has been complemented with the relatively recent introduction of some excellent arachnologists. In 1973, Ray and Lyn Forster wrote An Introduction to New Zealand Spiders. This book, which has been out of print for many years, allowed people to identify New Zealand spiders with the help of wonderful illustrations, and to appreciate their daily lives, with natural history observations that were a testimony to the amount of time Ray and Lyn spent observing spiders.

Although they both had international reputations in their respective fields of spider systematics and spider behaviour, they translated their enthusiasm for spider biology to a wide audience and the book was very popular here and overseas. Robert Jackson, one of the world's leading spider researchers, cites the Forster's book and the Forsters themselves as one of the reasons he took a position at the University of Canterbury 22 years ago. My fondness for spiders was fuelled by the Forster's book and I was very fortunate to have been the arachnologist's apprentice to Robert.

Some 26 years after the introduction was published, the Forsters have written Spiders of New Zealand and their Worldwide Kin. In the years between the publication of the two books, Ray and Lyn have contributed enormously to our understanding of New Zealand's spiders.

An additional 800 New Zealand spider species have been formally identified within 127 new genera and 16 new families, bringing the total to 1,300 species. Also, the phylogeny and biogeography of the New Zealand's fauna is now better understood and many of these findings have been incorporated into the new book.

The Forster's new book is already popular with arachnologists worldwide and essential reading to New Zealanders interested in the lives of the spiders they live amongst. By expanding the book to include relatives of the New Zealand fauna, readers can put our spiders in a more global perspective and also meet a number of the Australian species that have representatives in New Zealand.

The same quality of writing, drawings and Ray's excellent photographs that filled the first book are present in the new book. It also includes a number of photographs taken through a scanning electron microscope. These images show, in what to some will be a nightmarish clarity, how the bodies of spiders look like when they are highly magnified. On page 212, there is a scanning electron micrograph of a particularly bizarre spider from Madagascar whose appearance rivals that of any science fiction alien.

I was very pleased to be asked by the Otago University Press and the Otago Museum to launch the new book late last year. When I asked Ray and Lyn to sign a copy of the new book for me, I remembered back to 1977 when, as a budding arachnologist, I had asked them to sign the earlier version.

We are lucky in New Zealand to have such a dedicated pair of natural historians and fortunate that they been given the opportunity to update their classic book on New Zealand spiders. Buy it or the pregnant tarantula goes free.

Dr Simon Pollard works in the Department of Zoology at the University of Canterbury.