In the entire world, the spider is only found at the top of the Virginia Balsams, Grandfather Mountain, Roan Mountain, the Black Mountains, Great Smoky Mountains, and the Plott Balsams. Image Details The team assembled to monitor spruce-fir moss spiders at one of the monitoring plots on Roan Mountain heads down the trail into the backcountry.Īs the spider’s name implies, its range is very limited – living beneath mats of certain species of mosses and liverworts, collectively called bryophytes, growing on boulders beneath Fraser firs and red spruce, a forest that occurs only on the highest peaks in the southern Appalachians. Coyle’s work, including the most robust, range-wide survey of the spider which he completed in 2009, providing conservationists with what remains the most complete picture of where the spider is found. Nearly everything we know about the spider today can be traced back to Dr. Fred Coyle, retired from Western Carolina University. While many people may spend their careers specializing in whitetail deer or black bear, for the spruce-fir moss spider, there’s really only one… Dr. It was placed on the federal threatened and endangered species list as endangered in 1995. The spruce-fir moss spider is an endangered spider, maxing out at about the size of a match head. The resources often aren’t there to regularly track many rare species and when it happens regularly, it tends to be with large, charismatic species like wolves. One of the fundamental challenges of endangered species conservation is being able to get an idea of how well a plant or animal does over time - are populations deceasing or increasing? This can be hard because data on endangered species is often collected sporadically or opportunistically. How do you find such a creature, much less keep tabs on its status? The endangered spruce-fir moss spider tops out at the size of a match head. The same technology was used to follow imperiled gray bats in western North Carolina. The location of a red wolf can be tracked with a neck collar emitting a signal picked up by antennae. You can log onto the internet and follow a tagged great white shark along the eastern seaboard. State Parks prepare to head into the Roan Mountain backcountry to monitor spruce-fir moss spiders.Īsheville, N.C.
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