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Mengidabrutkoel (spider) #458

Open johnbent opened 9 months ago

johnbent commented 9 months ago

Mengidabrutkoel is the specific name of this spider:

image

Scientific name is Nephila maculate. More info about this spider in Palau is available in this article: https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/262_article_08ed.pdf.

I did confirm this with one native speaker. Can anyone please confirm?

jesseseeem commented 9 months ago

Just a spider taxonomy note: Olsen refers to this spider with the species name "Nephila maculata," but under current spider taxonomy, it is "Nephila pilipes" https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species/22452 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephila_pilipes

johnbent commented 9 months ago

Pls confirm. Which should we use for the dictionary?

On Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 2:29 AM Jesse Czekanski-Moir < @.***> wrote:

Just a spider taxonomy note: Olsen refers to this spider with the species name "Nephila maculata," but under current spider taxonomy, it is "Nephila pilipes" https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species/22452 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephila_pilipes

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jesseseeem commented 9 months ago

"Nephila pilipes" is the currently correct name. It could be useful to say something like, "Nephila pilipes (formerly Nephila maculata)" so people know the Olsen article is referring to the same species. The first link above, to the World Spider Catalogue, is where arachnologists keep track of spider names and their history of changes, and it shows the current name as "Nephila pilipes," as well as "Nephila maculata" as a previous name. Wikipedia is also moderately reliable, but the WSC is the best place to check.

That's the only spider that looks remotely like that in Palau, and it's distributed throughout SE Asia and into northern Australia. Note that the big ones are the females: the males in that genus are many times smaller, and are hard to find, but sometimes there will be a few hanging out on the web of a mature female. So, in the dictionary, it might be most specific to say that it refers to female Nephila pilipes (which is kind of a fun gender-swap from the usual ways Mengidabrutkoel is depicted in stories).

The attached image illustrating the difference in size between a mature male and a mature female is from figure 4 of this paper: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-ento-011019-025032

image