(ORDO NEWS) — There are currently 50,000 different species of spiders known to crawl the Earth, the World Spider Catalog (WSC) announced on Wednesday – and there may be 50,000 more.
The WSC, located at the Natural History Museum of Bern in the Swiss capital, said the 50,000th registered spider is Guriurius minuano, which belongs to the jumping spider family Salticidae and hunts its prey in bushes and trees in southern Brazil, Uruguay and around Buenos. -Ayres.
It was described by arachnologist Kimberly S. Martha and her colleagues in Brazil and named after the now extinct Minuane people who lived in the area.
The first scientific description of a spider was made in 1757, and although it took 265 years to reach 50,000 spiders, the rate of discovery is steadily increasing, and it is thought that it may be less than 100 years before the same number is discovered again.
“We estimate that we still have about 50,000 more spider species to discover,” the WSC publishers say.
The catalog of spiders is freely available on the museum’s website.
“Spiders are the most important predators in the terrestrial habitat on Earth and their ecological importance cannot be underestimated,” the museum said.
“Consuming between 400 and 800 million tons of insects annually, they are the most important regulators of insect populations. Accordingly, they are also of fundamental importance to humans.”
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