E14: New Species— of flying tarantulas with 11 eyes that can live for 20 years behind secret doors!

Dr. Rebecca Godwin is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Piedmont University in Demorest, Georgia, USA. She talks to us about her paper published in ZooKeys in which she describes 33 new species of trapdoor spiders!

We talk about flying tarantulas, the challenges of finding spiders that live underground behind a secret door, the reactions of people in university mailrooms to shipments sent to spider researchers, trapdoor spiders with eleven (or sometimes five?) eyes, and the amazingly long lives of female trapdoor spiders! The title of the paper is “Taxonomic revision of the New World members of the trapdoor spider genus UmmidiaThorell (Araneae, Mygalomorphae, Halonoproctidae).” The paper is in the April 4 issue of ZooKeys: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/issue/3229/

To learn more about Dr. Rebecca Godwin, follow her on Twitter, @8leggedyogi, or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebeccalgodwin , and you can visit her website: https://rgodwin5.wixsite.com/rebecca-godwin