Subscription Center
Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.
A tropical rainforest is so biologically intense that you can’t help but have many meetings with its inhabitants. Here, some of my most memorable encounters with animals in Borneo, presented as a top ten list.
10. Pill millipedes are big — maybe 4 cm long — and heavy, and yet they roll up when disturbed, just like the pill bugs back home in Canada. They aren’t closely related. Pill bugs are crustaceans, while pill millipedes are, well, millipedes.
Pill millipede
9. This lizard sat on a tree trunk, inches away from me as I brushed the trunk for spiders.
lizard
8. A cicada lands on my rice at the Mulu cafeteria.
Cicada
7. Edy, Alex and I each received wasp stings. Mine was on my lip, and provided a more dramatic photograph than Edy’s and Alex’s swellings. I was stung simply walking down the trail.
Wasp
6. At Camp 1 in Mulu, inside the shelter, there was this dry leaf carefully hung against the wall. A female Gelotia, one of our jumping spiders, had made a nest and was tending her babies. We left her unbothered, as our camp mascot.
Gelotia
On the morning we left to return to park headquarters, I was considering whether to collect her, but discovered that in her place was now a different jumping spider, a notably fat Bavia female. The nest and babies of Gelotia were gone. We don’t have enough evidence to convict, but the Bavia is strongly suspected of eating both the mother Gelotia and all of her babies.
Bavia
5. Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterflies were common every day on the main trail north at Mulu. Beautiful.
Rajah Brooke's birdwing butterflies
4. On our last day at Mulu, expert guide Syria Lejau Malang led us to Deer Cave, a spectacularly enormous cavern with millions of bats chittering and producing guano. The guano on the cave floor is deep enough for a human to swim in, but the only swimmers in the guano were the millions of cockroaches and other small creatures. Here’s a photo taken by Syria — the reddish material on the ground is guano.
Deer Cave
3. Leeches. Can’t forget the leeches.
Hmmmm. No need to show another photo…
2. I posted about unexpected things that fall when we shake vegetation to find spiders. One of the last days at Mulu, I shook a tree to get spiders out, and debris fell on my head. Suddenly I felt something in my ear — something was trying desperately to scurry back into a hole. It was the strangest sensation, feeling something rooting around in there, sounding very loud as it struck my eardrum. I brushed at it and shook my head, and this is what fell out. A 4 cm long centipede.
centipede
1. And, for my top encounter, another animal dropping from a tree. After shaking a tree for spiders, I felt something wriggling under my shirt. I lifted the bottom of my shirt, and this fell out.
What is this?
What is it? My first thought was, oh no, not another leech. It twitched and wriggled, but not like a leech. It felt too firm. I looked at it more closely, and realized what it was. It was the tail of a lizard. With the tail still twitching, the living lizard body must be nearby. I opened up my shirt further, and out dropped the gecko.
Gecko
The gecko must have fallen down my shirt, felt squeezed as if by a predator, and autotomized its tail as a diversionary tactic. I assume that it is out in the forest, working on regrowing its tail, as I write this.
Previously in this series:
Spiders in Borneo: Introduction
Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity
Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae
Spiders in Borneo: Team Salticid
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu National Park
Spiders in Borneo: Dreaming about salticid spiders
Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spiders in the forest
Spiders in Borneo: Beating around the bushes
Spiders in Borneo: Spiders in leaf litter
Spiders in Borneo: A Vertical Life
Spiders in Borneo: Leeches and eyeballs
Spiders in Borneo: Breaking News!
Spiders in Borneo: Falling from above
Spiders in Borneo: What I carry
Spiders in Borneo: Entangled and pierced
Spiders in Borneo: Scattered literature
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu wrap-up
Spiders in Borneo: Lambir Hills
Spiders in Borneo: Replaying the Tape of Life
Spiders in Borneo: More Hispo at Lambir
Spiders in Borneo: Geometrical Jumping spiders
Spiders in Borneo: Trees that grow from sky to ground
Spiders in Borneo: The spiders who wouldn’t be
Spiders in Borneo: The Music of Biodiversity
Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spider rainbow
Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY)
About the Author: Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.
Rights & Permissions
We Fit Nature to Us: Evolution's 2-Way Street
Discover the Secret of the 17-Year Cicada, But It Won’t Get You Tenure
Why Portland Is Wrong About Water Fluoridation
The Moon has it all: Explosions, Water, and Clues to the Grand Tack
Pirates, Charles Darwin, and One Very Un-Extinct Dodo
U.S. Hurricane Forecasts Could Be Better
See what we're tweeting about
BoraZ RT @philipyam: 7 Hot Editorial Jobs in Los Angeles, New York and More http://t.co/yHCiiKS6tR via @mashable
philipyam 7 Hot Editorial Jobs in Los Angeles, New York and More http://t.co/AlNfcmALY2 via @mashable
jgold85 If you're at #aps2013dc, don't miss @SciAmBlogs blogger @melanietbaum's talk! http://t.co/PZJSCarUtp
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
Share
Email
Print
Add a Comment
You must sign in or register as a ScientificAmerican.com member to submit a comment.
Click one of the buttons below to register using an existing Social Account.