At Ohio State University, reports the Dispatch’s Poh Si Teng, a series of professors have been collecting, sorting, naming and cataloging every spider anybody in Ohio sends them. The first 306 were done early in the last century by one professor. Another added 277 from 1994 to 2004. And now a third has picked up the ethyl alcohol bottle to rehydrate specimens sent by a network of volunteers around the state and see what they are. Pic: a black-spotted fishing spider.
Discoveries include not only the range of spiders native to the state, but arrivals of new species from elsewhere, such a Eurasian jumping spider that first showed up six years ago, with four speciments reaching the examination bench. Every day they check the mail for more, often packed into film canisters or old pill bottles.
See also: Dispatch sidebar picked up from Baltimore Sun, by Dennis O’Brien .
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