How many types of spider do you think you can find on St. Martin? If you’ve never been out trying to find them, which probably includes most of the people here, it might be normal to guess ten or twenty species. A quick look through my photos from the last couple years tells me I’ve seen over 50 species, and even that is probably just a fraction of the total. A list of of known spiders from the US Virgin Islands includes about 200 species, which is probably closer to the total here on St. Martin.

Even with decent photos of the spiders, though, it can be surprisingly hard to figure out what species they are. There are about 40,000 known species of spider in the world, and perhaps at least that many that haven’t been described yet. In this day and age, one would think that a photo of almost every species would be available on the internet, but that’s far from true. On St. Martin, it’s entirely possible that there are unknown species waiting to be discovered.

Below are some photos taken in one small spot near my apartment in Grand Case, including six species of spider from five different families. Hopefully someday we’ll know much more about the spiders of St. Martin. Even today, anyone with a camera and some curiosity can help improve our knowledge of local spider diversity.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 10:58 am and is filed under Explorations, Les Fruits sur la Terre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.