Kumudini Hettiarachchi
It is not the attractive “charismatic” creatures such as the sleek leopard or the majestic elephant that lured them, but the small, neglected and unsung creature many would crush under their feet.
Their arduous search into numerous nights, going into weeks, months and a year, however, has not only brought the tarantula under the torchlight but also the research team into the limelight.
While looking for tarantulas in the wild by scrutinising tree-holes, tree trunks and tree barks where they usually live, the research team headed by Ranil Nanayakkara of Biodiversity Education and Research (BEAR) saw to their delight not just a mothertarantula but about 15 spiderlings of a particular species thought by some to be extinct or on the brink of extinction.
Soon after, the team also found about 15 more male, female and juvenile tarantulas within a 10km radius around the female with the spiderlings, the Sunday Times understands, with the “discovery” being spe- cial because this species was also believed to be restricted to Haragama in the Kandy district, with their numbers dwindling. “It is the tarantula species
and we found them in the Matale district an aerial distance of 30 km from Haragama,” says Ranil, declining to give the specific area because they are still writing up the paper and conducting the taxonomy work and are fearful that there may be attempts to collect them illegally for the pet trade.
The team’s research includes the determination whether the P. smithi tarantulas found recently are a “relict population”, according to him.
Ranil then leads us back in time to the information collated about tarantulas in Sri Lanka. It had been way back in 1803 that tarantulas of the genus Poecilotheria were recorded here. Till 1885, this genus was monotypic, consisting of the single species P. fasciata and considered distribution-specific to Sri Lanka. In early 1895, R.I. Pocock had described the species P. subfusca and in 1899, the species P. ornata. In 1913, Strand had found P. uniformis and by 1996, more than 100 years after the very first discovery, British scientist Peter Kirk had described P. smithi with a type specimen collected from Haragama in the Kandy district. It was Kirk again in 2001 who found P. pederseni.
Even though there were several studies from 2002 to 2005, P. smithi had not been spotted in the wild