![]() ![]() It’s not just individual European nations the problem is continent-wide. “And even when the conservation status of the species was provided, information was often incomplete or out-of-date, resulting in assessments based on poor quality information and high levels of subjectivity.” “What surprised us most while assembling the data was the extremely poor level of knowledge about the conservation status, extinction risk and factors threatening the survival of European spider species, despite Europe being one of the most studied regions of the world in terms of biodiversity,” says Filippo Milano, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. Researchers found the same results - or lack thereof - throughout Europe. Greece, meanwhile, has nearly 1,300 spider species within its borders, but scientists have only assessed the conservation needs of 32 of them. Italy, for example, is home to more than 1,700 spider species, but fewer than 450 have had their conservation status assessed and only two have any legal protection in that country. Most have never even been adequately assessed or studied in detail, so we don’t know much about their extinction risk or their ecological needs. How bad is the problem? A new paper by Isaia and 18 other experts digs into the conservation status of Europe’s 4,154 known spider species and finds that only a few have any protection at the national level. They’re also important to people, both as predators of pest species and as inspiration for medicines and engineering. Spiders, he says, have enormous ecological value as food for birds and other animals. “Efforts in conservation of spiders are particularly meaningful for nature conservation,” Isaia points out. That’s a major gap in species-protection efforts - one that has wide repercussions. Average people don’t think much about them, relatively few scientists study them, and conservation groups and governments don’t act enough to protect them. Perhaps that’s why spiders remain under-represented across the world’s endangered-species conservation plans. “Nightmares, anxieties and fears are very frequent reactions in ‘normal’ people,” he concedes. “The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. Spiders need our help, and we may need to overcome our biases and fears to make that happen. ![]()
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