Meet Spider-Man: the ecology student who has arachnid experts buzzing | UniSC | University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia

Superheroes go to great lengths to keep their identities a secret. They don aliases, costumes and disguises, meeting police and reporters in the dead of night on rooftops and in dark alleys. 

This ‘Spider-Man’ isn’t quite as mysterious.

His name is Ethan Yeoman. He’s a third-year Bachelor of Science student at UniSC’s Moreton Bay Campus at Petrie, and he didn’t appear to be wearing a disguise when I met him.

He assured me he’s never saved New York from a hellbent madman. But what Ethan has done, is potentially unearth dozens of spider species that have never been found before, or at least documented by science.

Armed with a camera, a microscope, and an extraordinary eye for detail, he has meticulously collected and catalogued thousands of these bizarre, beautiful, and yes, sometimes scary creatures.

“Since I started, I’ve collected 2,700 specimens across roughly 1,000 different species,” Ethan said.

“Understandably, the funnel webs and huntsmen make a lot of people’s skin crawl. But species like peacock spiders, with their striking and unusual colours, can actually be quite visually appealing.

“I love the diversity. There are not many other groups of animals where you can go out and find such an abundance of species in a small area, many of which have not been photographed before.”

Not bad for a kid with a phobia of spiders growing up.

Ethan’s fear turned to fascination when he came across a video of a pet tarantula on YouTube.

“It just flipped that switch in my head, I don’t know how else to explain it. Pretty soon I had one of my own,” he said.

“Not long after that, I met Dr Robert Raven who was an arachnologist and collection curator at the Queensland Museum. He took me under his wing, gave me a microscope, and set me loose!”

In some areas, like Cooloola, Ethan has now literally written the book on spiders, and takes part in the region’s annual ‘BioBlitz’ – an event which brings scientists and volunteers together to conduct an intensive survey of a region’s biodiversity.

“Over five BioBlitzes at Cooloola we’ve recorded 244 spider species, and of those, 133 are considered ‘putative undescribed species’ – which means we think they haven’t been documented scientifically before.”

Unsurprisingly, Ethan’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed by the world of science.

Dr Owen Seeman – one Australia’s leading arachnologists and the Collection Manager: Arachnida at The Queensland Museum – called him “Australia’s most-promising arachnologist of his generation”.

“He has an excellent eye for biodiversity,” Dr Seeman said.

“As Ethan rightly noted, the ‘new’ species he’s documented are best called ‘putative new species’ as we can’t be 100 percent sure unless other costly and time-consuming steps were taken.

“That said, I can confidently say that Ethan has taken every other possible measure to verify their uniqueness.

“He is a rare find.”

It’s easy to forget that Ethan is still an undergraduate, who hasn’t even completed a Bachelor of Science yet.

Wherever post-graduate studies take him, rest assured it’ll involve eight legs and lots more digging around the bush.

“I’m interested in studying spiders further in a broader ecological sense,” he said.

“They can be useful bioindicators of an ecosystem’s health. But not a lot of ecologists have the taxonomy knowledge to identify them. I think I could help of bridge the gap between those two fields.”