Spider found in Brazilian caves named after ‘Lord of the Rings’ character

The team, headed by Dr Ricardo Pinto-da-Rocha of the Instituto de Biociências da Universidade de São Paulo, named the new species Iandumoema smeagol after the ‘Lord of the Rings’ character Smeagol. The researchers called on the population and the biology of landumoema smeagol for long term studies, as element of an attempt to set up a conservation policy for the species and possibily a protected region surrounding the caves.

Daddy longlegs, also known as harvestmen, belong to the order opiliones and while they are arachnids they are not spiders, despite what many people assume. Though, the harvestmen superficially resemble spiders, they have a single pair of eyes and a fused body structure that differs from spiders.

Norman I. Platnick, an arachnologist with the American Museum of Natural History in NY, calls the discovery as usual.

According to Live Science, the arachnid shares several similarities with Smeagol, as both are small and pale and never leave their cave.

“Slowly but surely we pick away at discovering and naming our earth’s biodiversity”. Never getting out of its subterranean home, the new daddy longlegs species is the most highly modified representative among its close relatives and only the second one with no eyes living in Brazil.

A total of 14 individuals of the new species were observed by the scientists. As an adaptation, the new harvestman species is eyeless and has a reduced amount of melanistic pigmentation, which shows through its pale yellowish colours. In 2008, another team of researchers discovered a similar-looking harvestman in the limestone caves of Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil (the same state where the new Smeagol harvestman was discovered).

The harvestmen were found in a cave littered with deposits of organic matter-typical for this type or arachnid.