Recently, Ph.D. student Mark Wong was walking through Tallaganda State Forest in the Australian state of New South Wales, looking for different species of spiders. During the walk, he moved a stone that revealed the entrance of the burrow of an Atrax sutherlandi, a subspecies of Australian natural funnel web spider, which may be about five centimeters long but produces a strong enough poison. to kill a person.

The student then began to poke the inside of the den, trying to make the spider reveal itself, but was surprised to find that the specimen that appeared had a color never before registered in that species. The fangs and dorsal region of the arachnid were red, whereas A. sutherlandi is usually almost completely black except for the underside of the body which is usually dark brown.

Amber Beavis, a spider expert and senior researcher at the Australia Regional Institute, told National Geographic that it is common for many animal species to have color variations, but the case of this particular spider is particularly intriguing. This is because spiders of this particular species see very poorly, are solitary and spend most of their time in the safety of their burrows, so color variation would not bring mating benefits, for example.

Comparison between a common A. sutherlandi spider and the specimen found by Mark Wong - Image: National Geographic

The expert spent five years exploring the same region as the student and had never seen anything like it. Wong captured the single copy and took it to the Institute's lab, but the animal died. A thorough search of the region could not find another similar specimen, indicating that the probable reason for that spider to have red body parts was a genetic mutation.

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