New species of spider discovered in UK confirmed by Manchester expert

A spider expert in Manchester has confirmed that a new tiny spider species has been discovered in the UK. The species was found during an annual survey last year at the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus.

There’s no record of the species, named Anasaitis milesae (Tremough Jumper), anywhere else in the world. But it’s related to other species known in the Caribbean, so experts believe the spiders arrived in the UK on imported plants.

During the annual BioBlitz survey in Cornwall several of the tiny jumping spiders (4mm long), along with 500 other species, were collected. Spider experts believed the species was unlikely to be a Cornish native - so sent them to Dmitri Logunov, Europe's leading jumping spider expert, at Manchester Museum.

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After the specimens were sent to Logunov, it was quickly confirmed they matched nothing in Europe. Co-organiser Finley Hutchinson, a BSc Conservation Biology and Ecology student at the University of Exeter, said: "The spider was among over 500 species we found and identified during BioBlitz 2023.

"I hadn't seen anything like them before, and neither had Cornish spider expert Tylan Berry. So Tylan went out and found some more later the same day, and he and I collected many more from tree ferns near Lime Avenue on campus a couple of weeks later."

Finley explained: "The jumping spider family is the largest spider family in the world, so narrowing it down beyond that took much longer. However, eventually he identified them as a member of the Caribbean genus Anasaitis, but not a known species."

"So, strangely, this species has not been formally identified in its native range – so the only records in