A team of scientists, led by Carlos Perafán from the University of the Republic (Uruguay) has discovered in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, a new species of tarantula that throws stinging hairballs as a method of attack against its victims.
The tarantula in question has received a double denomination: Kankuamo in honor of an indigenous people of the region of the Caribbean coast, whose language and culture are threatened and, for another Marquezi, in consideration of the writer -also Colombian- Gabriel García Márquez who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and passed away in 2014.
“This new finding is a great contribution to the knowledge of arachnids in Colombia and a sign of how much remains to be discovered, ” the authors highlight.
The discovery of the Kankuamo marquezi tarantula not only means the meeting of a new species, but also of a new genus of tarantulas, since, according to experts, it would be the first tarantula of a subfamily that uses its stinging defense hairs to direct attack, instead of using them to ‘beat up’ the enemy with them.
These hairs are part of a trifling oval park of spear-shaped barbs; These hairs -which come out of a bald spot in the tarantula’s belly- are directed and fired at the enemy / prey wrapped in a stinging ball that is capable of causing fatal injuries to small mammals when they affect their mucous membrane.
“The morphological characteristics present in Kankuamo marquezi open a discussion about the phylogenetic relationship between the subfamilies of Theraphosidae tarantulas and the evolutionary pressures that gave rise to the stinging hairs,” the researchers say.
The discovery has been published in the magazine ZooKeys.
