About the Spider Club
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This file has been cleaned of potential threats. If you confirm that the file is coming from a trusted source, you can send the following SHA-256 hash value to your admin for the original file. ac21ca4a9c6f278f15a01514af95831cad9153ba8313e9ae5fa175044225d3e9 To view the reconstructed contents, please SCROLL DOWN to next page. The Spider Club News OCTOBER 2017 – VOLUME 33 No. 3 PUTTING US IN OUR PLACE …. Page The Spider Club News October 2017 Vol 33/3 Page 2 About the Spider Club The Spider Club of Southern Africa is a non-profit organisation. Our aim is to encourage an interest in arachnids – especially spiders and scorpions - and to promote this interest and the study of these animals by all suitable means. Membership is open to anyone – people interested in joining the club may apply to any committee member for information. Field outings, day visits, arachnid surveys and demonstrations, workshops and exhibits are arranged from time to time. A diary of events and outings is published at the end of this newsletter. Our Mission Statement “The Spider Club provides a fun, responsible, social learning experience, centred on spiders, their relatives and on nature in general.” Contact Us Your Committee Secretary Colleen Damon 081 565 7646 [email protected] Facebook identifications Niela du Preez 072 304 9358 [email protected] And Public Relations Newsletter Editor Joan Faiola 082 565 6025 [email protected] Treasurer Jaco Le Roux 083 258 8969 [email protected] Chairman Astri Leroy 073 168 7187 [email protected] Webmaster JP Schutte 076 926 1121 [email protected] Member at large Miemmie Byrch 082 772 3928 [email protected] Member at large Ruan Lambrechts 084 584 5566 [email protected] WEBSITE: http://www.spiderclub.co.za EMAIL ADDRESS: [email protected] …. At the Spider Club of Southern Africa page The Spider Club News October 2017 Vol 33/3 Page 3 I’m keeping this short, because Astri has written a fabulous Hub, longer than usual, and needing some space. It follows this note. Lately members are sending us some lovely contributions to the newsletter. This time we have an article by Joh Henschel and Yael Lubin on stone-nest spiders in exclusion areas in the Karoo that are set up to understand what happens when you exclude sheep and other domestic food animals, or conversely, to measure the damage done by them. Also, we review three new books, all of them good. Dr Richard Pearce of the BAS has contributed an article on Every Spider Matters, which contains universal good sense about spiders. I do hope you enjoy the newsletter. Yours in spidering Joan FROM THE HUB – IN TWO PARTS EUROPEAN CONGRESS OF ARACHNOLOGY and other stories Please forgive me but this time I won’t be talking about the Spider Club or about you, the lovely Spider Club members, instead here’s something about my latest spider adventure. I’m really not sure where to begin, I have SOOO much to tell you! Spiders have taken me out of my comfort zone again, this time to England. There was to be a Spider Day at Waltham Place, the Oppenheimers’ beautiful estate in Berkshire on 24th of August and we were to entertain and educate invited guests. To our immense surprise and delight Prof Ansie Dippenaar, John and I were offered a return flight to England, so that we could showcase the work being carried out on spiders in South th Me holding forth at the 30 ECA Africa. Ansie felt she was unable to face the long flight and delegated Stefan to take her in Nottingham, England. place. But I am getting ahead of myself, back to the 30th European Congress of Arachnology. I had been toying with the idea of a trip to Britain to visit family and to attend the ECA in Nottingham, so it all fell in place, I could attend the first two days of the congress and get back to Berkshire in time for the spider day. Quick e-mail to Stefan, “If you go, I’ll go.” We both decided to attend. The conference was beautifully organized by a committee made up of Sara Goodacre, Dmitri Logunov, Geoff Oxford, Tony Russell-Smith and Yuri Marusik. I swear there were dozens of Saras. She was everywhere ready to lend and hand, give instructions and shepherd delegates in the right directions and she was ably assisted by the 10 friendly and efficient green people (her helpers). To say I enjoyed the conference would be a huge understatement. It was lovely to meet up with old friends, make new friends and meet people face to face who had previously just been names and as always to enjoy the company of like-minded people. As usual parallel sessions were a problem. For example, Richard Gallon presented The Spider Club News October 2017 Vol 33/3 Page 4 his “Revision of the southern African spider genus Brachionopus” at the same time as Stefan’s presentation. I HAD to attend both, so why couldn’t there be two of me? In the end Stefan’s presentation won. It was interesting that we were not the only non-European (!) delegates; The UK and Czech Republic fielded the most delegates but attendees came from Israel, Brazil, Sri Lanka, The USA, New Zealand and Algeria and although Marlis Dumke is from Germany she spoke about the Australian sub-social crab spider Australomisidia ergandro, André Walter from Denmark talked about group feeding in “our” sub-social Stegodyphus africanus. There were presentations on all aspects of arachnology from around the world, not just Europe and on our way back to Berkshire (once we had discovered where the temporary bus ticket office was located!) Stefan suggested that it would be good to open up our local African Arachnological Society Colloquium to presentations on arachnids and arachnology from around the world. Previous Colloquia invitations have stipulated that presentations should be on African arachnids only. I think that would be an excellent idea to widen our horizons. It is always difficult to say which presentations were most interesting, inspiring or just plain entertaining but let me stick my neck out and say the two Plenary Session speakers were wonderful (as they should be). Yael Lubin’s talk “The other spider societies” about Cyrtophora citricola known as colonial spiders with behavioural flexibility and Fritz Vollrath’s “Spider webs and their silks” both blew me away. Yael is of course an old and dear friend, Fritz Vollrath an inspiring new one. It was good to talk with to him late on Tuesday evening in a church-become-pub. If you recall our collection of live Euprosthenops australis from Terra Nostra, so long ago went directly to his laboratory at Oxford and apparently enabled the initiation of valuable research into the properties of silk. One of the newly discovered properties is that it doesn’t change or become brittle at very low temperatures; Samu Ferenc’s presentation showing that the simple presence of spiders inhibits the depredations of crop destroying invertebrates - biocontrol without consumption by scaring the baddies away. Another delightful presentation was about the diversity and ecology of spiders found in the hollows of the Spanish oak Quercus pyrenaica. Yuri Marusik as usual turned several known “facts” of biogeography, spider classification on their heads. On Wednesday morning Stefan and I had to change gear so to speak, and travel to Waltham Place via London. We were quite proud of ourselves having arrived at Maidenhead station at precisely 3.30 p.m. as arranged from South Africa and there were my husband John and Duncan MacFadyen of E Oppenheimer and Son waiting to whisk us to another world, Waltham Place Farm. These pictures of Waltham Place are available online at www.walthamplace.com and show (left) part of the garden where you can see mown areas are minimal and plants are allowed to grow between mown bits at their own pace. The earliest parts of this elegant house date back to a manor built in 1634 but most of it dates from 18th century. The barn, where we gave our talks and had tea and lunch is very old and in fact is mentioned in The Doomsday Book, a survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086! The Spider Day commenced at 9:30 (a time deemed early in the UK) with a welcome by Strilli Oppenheimer to the 32 guests. The first presentation was Prof Stefan Foord’s “South African spiders, their importance in a balanced ecology”, then Matt Shardlow gave the UK perspective on the conservation of spiders, teatime (delicious!) and Dr Sarah Henshall of Buglife UK told us about the spiders of Waltham Place and where we were likely to find them. I was last, talking about spiders of Brenthurst Garden in Johannesburg. Here are the speakers: The Spider Club News October 2017 Vol 33/3 Page 5 From left to right, Dr Sarah Henshall of Buglife UK, Matt Shardlow, Prof Stefan Foord, Astri & John Leroy To use Strilli Oppenheimer’s own words the farm and garden at Waltham place are informal biodynamic and organic which means there were spiders EVERYWHERE! After our presentations we mixed with the guests at lunch and then each of us, paired with someone who knew the estate took groups to look for and at spiders. Of course, August in Britain is premier spider time when adults mature, ready to mate lay eggs and die before the northern winter. There were many spiders in the family Linyphiidae that were strange to me - almost 1/3 of all species in Britain belong to this family.