Male White-Knuckled Wolf Spider (Aulonia albimana) Photo by By Ludivine Lamare – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/377920543, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=177591874

Dear Readers, I do love a happy story, what with all the misery that’s about at the moment, and so I’m pleased to report the rediscovery of this little spider on the Isle of Wight. Last seen in 1985, and thought to be extinct, the White-knuckled Wolf Spider was so named because of those white patches on the pedipalps (the ‘boxing gloves’ at the front of the head). However, the re-discovery was also something of a white-knuckled ride – it was found in the very last minutes of a time-limited boat trip to an otherwise inaccessible part of a nature reserve. Any of us who have run to a ferry station just as the gangplank is about to be pulled up can relate, I’m sure. But here we are, and this little chap(pess) is being described as ‘one of the lost species rediscoveries of the century’ by the British Arachnological Society.

The Newtown reserve, where the spider was found, is being restored by the National Trust – over time it had become overgrown with heather, but the Trust had imported some Hebridean sheep, who restore the short-cropped, open, sunlit spots that the spider likes. And it seems to have worked. And what very fine animals these are, though I wouldn’t want  to mess with them if they were in a bad mood.

Hebridean rams (Photo By TMallinson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125301377)

We don’t know much about the White-knuckled Wolf Spider’s life: most wolf spiders are agile hunters of other invertebrates, but this species also spins a web. But it’s great to know that it’s still around, and that the measures undertaken by the National Trust are having an effect. The entomologists (or should that be arachnologists?) who found it, Mark Telfer and Graeme Lyons, were delighted – Graeme Lyons said that he’d seen 559 species of spider in the British Isles, and this was his most exciting find. So it just goes to show that there are probably more species out there than we know, and that a little attention and knowledge can reveal the most fascinating things.

Female White-knuckled Spider (Photo  By Emanuele Santarelli – https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/129316865, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=177591975)