Britain’s rarest spider is making a triumphant return to its native heaths in Dorset.
The ladybird spider (Eresus sandaliatus) is not only our rarest, but has to be the most spectacular of our British spiders.
Thought to be extinct in the UK since 1906, when it was last recorded in Bournemouth, it was re-discovered at a secret location in Dorset in 1979 by Dr Peter Merrett. With careful management of the habitat, the site now has such a good population that spiders can be translocated from there to carefully chosen sites in the county, including Dorset Wildlife Trust’s Tadnoll and Winfrith nature reserve.
The ladybird spider is fussy about its habitat. It likes patchy, well drained, south facing lowland heath; Thomas Hardy’s ‘Egdon Heath’ in fact. When it disappeared, along with much of the heathland of Bournemouth and Poole, naturalists thought that was the end of the story. But after the rediscovery in another part of Dorset in the 1970s, it is now thought that it had, in fact, been more widespread, so that the re-introduction at Tadnoll and Winfrith is almost certainly a return of the native.
From
http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/index.php ... ws&id=2462
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