Zephyrarchaea austini

The spider

The Kangaroo Island assassin spider is 2 mm (0.079 in) in size and lives in leaf litter of wet eucalypt woodland near Billy Goat Falls in the Western River Wilderness Protection Area on the island. The females are distinguished from other members of the Zephyrarchaea genus by a small body size, a carapace length of less than 1.10mm a height/length ratio of less than 1.70mm.

Range and habitat

Zephyrarchaea austini or the Kangaroo Island assassin spider is a Australian assassin spiders that is endemic to the north west of Kangaroo Island, South Australia.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

In crisis

The facts that they were found outside the species' formerly known range in the Western River Protection Area, and that one is a juvenile, has given hope that there may be more populations. However the low dispersal remaining after the fires has likely led to less genetic diversity and therefore greater vulnerability, so intervention may be considered in the future to assist survival.

Zephyrarchaea austini is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Zephyrarchaea austini, Wikidata item Q18667408. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.