A research guided byTurku University (Finland) has found four new species of Tarantula, whose male individuals show exceptionally large genitalia. And no, these Tarantole did not evolve so to impress the partners, but to survive the mate with them.
The females of these species are in fact so aggressive that males needed to defend themselves: for this reason their evolution has selected individuals with particularly long sexual organs, in order to “keep distance”.
Based on their structure and genetic characteristics, they are so different from their closer relatives that we had to create a completely new genre to classify them – explains Alireza Zamani, who guided the research – and we called it Satyrex
The name, in particular, is the combination of words Satyr And rex. A satyr is in fact a character of Greek mythology, partly human and partly animal, with exceptionally large genitalia. The Latin word rex Instead it means king.
The males of these spiders have the lines, or coupling organs, longer among all known Tarantols. Our preliminary hypothesis is that the long lines can allow the male to maintain a safety distance during mating and avoid being attacked and devoured by the female, extremely aggressive
The greatest species of the genre Satyrex And Satyrex Feroxwhich has an opening of the legs of about 14 cm, and the male’s eyelid can reach the incredible length of 5 cm, almost four times longer than the front of his body and almost as much as his longest legs, against a typical length of 1.5-2 times that of the front of the body.
The name Ferox means ferocious, and adapts well to this species, which is strongly defensive. At the minimum disturbance, it raises the front legs in a threat position and emits a strong hiss by rubbing one against the other specialized hair on the basal segments of the front legs
As for the other specimens of the group, the researchers called S. Arabicus And S. Somalicus Based on their respective regions of origin, while S. Specosus It owes its name to its brilliant coloring.
The Satyrex Longimanus, despite having an elongated palpus, was previously classified in the Monocentropus genre, where the male palpus is only about 1.6 times the carapace. The much longer thighs than S. Longimanus and the four species recently described were the main reason why we decided to establish a new genre for these spiders instead of inserting them in the monocentropus genre
All members of this genre live underground, in the la thels at the base of shrubs or between the rocks.
The study was published on Zookeys.
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Sources: Turku / Zookeys University
