Published in the Jackson Hole News & Guide June 3rd, 2015
You can find me on the side of the road most summer days. The sloping gravel that remains when man cuts through mountain landscapes to build asphalt lanes is often a good place to find certain arthropods.
As I walked along Highway 89 in mid-August 2011, I noticed a small black and red spider scurrying along the gravel. The spider was carrying a pebble half the size of itself, and without a closer look I would have mistaken it for an ant.
But sure enough, eight legs! My curiosity took over. What was this spider doing? And where was it going? I followed the spider with my eyes as it climbed a rock and placed the pebble on top. Over the next few minutes the spider gathered more and more pebbles, stacking each piece of sandstone on top of another, forming a cairn-like mound and sealing each addition in place with silk. When it was finished, there stood a mound 10 times the size of the spider, equivalent to a human building a gravel pile 20 feet tall in an hour.
I pulled out my phone and took a video of the spider at work. I was a wildlife biology student at the University of Montana and a budding naturalist. I was hoping to use the video to ask my professors what kind of spider would spend its time performing this exhausting task. I had never seen anything like it, but at 21 years old I hadn’t seen much and was sure a little digging would lead to an answer.
On that day I didn’t know that giving my inner curiosity a moment of attention would open up the doors to discovery and graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. In the four years that have passed I have discovered that the tiny spider, now called the mason spider, was previously unknown to science and that at least for now is the only known spider in the world that builds mounds.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem has attracted naturalists and scientists for more than a century, so it might surprise you that discoveries are still being made here. In fact, not one national park in the United States has been systematically searched for wildlife organisms, let alone all species including plants and fungi. In the past decade, hyped “bioblitz” programs have exposed just how much we have to learn from our national parks (A 2009 Yellowstone bio-blitz uncovered more than 1,100 new species). Still, bioblitz programs are few and far between, and funding for scientific field exploration is waning.
Today science relies on amateur naturalists to make discoveries. You might not consider yourself a naturalist, but if you make daily pilgrimages to forested trails and blue-sky vistas or can identify that a magpie destroyed your trash, you qualify. Naturalists abound in Jackson Hole. We often romanticize men like Charles Darwin and Henry Walter Bates, travelers and naturalists of the 19th century, who discovered new spaces and the species that inhabited them, but we shouldn’t treat discovery as a thing of the past. Each moment spent in the open spaces of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an opportunity for discovery: of species and of self. We should pay attention to each flash of curiosity because for as much as we know about the ecosystem there is much more that has yet to be discovered.
This summer I will embark on another field season in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem as a part of my graduate work at UC Berkeley. I hope to reveal why mason spiders build mounds and how this unique behavior evolved.
Next time you stop for a break while hiking, look for a tiny pebble mound — the sign of a red and black mason spider. Or better yet, put your Darwin hat on, keep your eyes open, and have confidence in your curiosity. You just might discover your own fascinating species that is new to science.