It is only a few millimeters in size, performs a dance as part of a courtship ritual and has striking colored markings on its back that “look like a pharaoh’s headdress,” but when biologist Jurgen Otto first spotted the peacock spider species that he has named Maratus unicup, he did not immediately recognize how special it was.
“I didn’t think much of it because I’m partially color blind, but there was quite a reaction to photographs of it on the Internet, with people saying it’s beautiful,” Otto said.
Maratus unicup is one of two new peacock spider species that Otto and his colleague David Hill have named in a new paper published in the international spider journal Peckhamia
Otto discovered the spider near Lake Unicup in Western Australia last year.
He said the new species was notable for its courtship display, in which the male dances — swinging its abdomen from side to side — while the female watches from a close distance.
The second species they have named Maratus tortus and was discovered by environmental consultant and educator David Knowles in 1994 near Walpole in Western Australia.
Knowles and Otto have returned to the site several times and were finally able to capture specimens of the spider last year.
Knowles had originally nicknamed the species “hokey pokey” because of the male’s curious twisting dance.
“There’s no other peacock spider that has this kind of a display,” Otto said. “It looks almost like a Spanish bullfight, where the female is the bull and the male is the bullfighter.”
In the paper, Otto and Hill say there are now 70 species of peacock spiders, the majority of which have been named by them over the past seven years.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing