Jewel-Colored Flies Spell Death for Baby Spiders Baby spiders
beware: Researchers have just described four new types of spider
flies, whose larvae infect the bloodstream of juvenile spiders.
A paper published March 1 in the journal Zookeys catalogs the
huge variety of spider flies in Australasia, including four
genera whose larvae specialize in parasitizing spiders like
tarantulas, trap door spiders and funnel web spiders. Genera are
a scientific classing of organisms that includes species; these
ones belong to the subfamily Panopinae and live in the area of
the world that includes Asia, Australia, New Guinea and
Indonesia. "It’s a very charismatic group and very interesting,
but it's very rarely collected and hadn't been worked on in many
years," study researcher Shaun Winterton, of the California
Department of Food & Agriculture, told LiveScience. "We wanted
to make the knowledge we had available to the scientific
community." Winterton also discovered four new species of Panops
from Australia. They are P. a