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Amblypygids became the cave version of Cola. At first it was difficult to find a laboratory. Once he did, however, he became a prolific contributor to Harvey’s spreadsheets, describing new species everywhere from Timor-Leste to Belize. If you look at his work, it seems like the perfect army of ambivalents is up and running, but that’s not it. Above all, de Miranda said, “It’s just a matter of looking for people.”
It was Colla looking, however, not specifically for the ambliipigidos, but for what he experienced in the Italian bunker in 2003. He was not alone. Trieste is near the summit of the Italian boot, between the Slovenian border and the Adriatic Sea. To the east, in fact, is a plateau full of galleries and caves, which Cola calls the birthplace of cave science. The claim is debatable, but it is not a long-standing obsession with caves in the region: between 1880 and 1920, about 2,000 caves were described and members of the Trieste Alpine Club have been crawling from mushrooms to caves to sites since 1945. so many people entered natural tunnels outside the city — and under humans — that it seemed unlikely that the anbilipigids had passed unnoticed.
The world of Whip spider research is small, and de Miranda was involved in Colla’s research shortly after the club saw its first ambliipigida. This was not a new species. In fact, it was widespread, a neighbor of the sewers and caves of Jerusalem — it recently helped the species for the first time in Jordan, where it was expected and in the Greek peninsula, as it did not exist. The anbilipigids are tropical and subtropical, and Jordan has the right climate because until recently no one bothered to register the species, but the place was supposed to be a beetle. Athens, however, is colder, and de Miranda was not sure whether the population there was native or entered. But Trieste is located 1,000 kilometers northwest. Hebets, who was not involved in the project, heard rumors of unreported ambliipigids in Italy. To Miranda, however, this particular region seemed too cold.
The bunker is known as Kleine Berlin — Little Berlin — a set of four different shelters, built for three Italian civilians, one for German soldiers. Inside, Colla could be seen reclaiming part of the earth’s past, wartime graffiti in some places, stalactites in others, the toilet here, where the lava-shaped mineral cover was on the wall and on the floor. The whips were found by spiders on the Nazi side, in a 260-meter-long wet tunnel next to the courthouse, littered with rusty relics and outside the tourist limits. There they were, clinging to the wall: not a single ambulatory, but the whole population. He and his colleagues would count a total of nine. Eventually, greenish babies appeared on the back of an adult, crossing their antennae legs, de Miranda said, “like a noodle soup.”
But as far as the researchers could tell, all the inhabitants of Trieste were female. This meant that they were reproducing without males, using a strategy called parthenogenesis – in Greek “virgin birth”. It is a trick seen among some arachnids, insects, crustaceans and reptiles, which lay viable eggs that do not have sex. Many of them — including these ambizipigids — seem to be versatile, sometimes covered, other times carrying babies alone.
The driving force in one way or another can be environmental. “It could be a density factor when you reach a certain age: ‘I’m not going to come across species like me, I’m going to start producing eggs,'” arachnologist Mercedes Burns of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, explained. in some creatures, the egg’s chromosomes duplicate themselves or the egg undergoes false fertilization.Some cells involved in egg development also have chromosomes and, as usual, can act like sperm, giving the missing piece all the genetic material they need. In general, it is a dangerous maneuver — a bad crook and the entire population can be killed — but useful for narcotics: only one female can go anywhere and find the position of her clones.
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