Adapted from text by Fiona Gilsenan (Corpus Christi College)

Research into peacock spiders by an international team, including PhD candidate candidate Jonah Walker and his doctoral supervisor Dr Joana Meier, featured on BBC One's breakfast programme this morning.  Jonah is a member of Joana’s research group, which is based both at the Tree of Life Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and here in Zoology.

A focus of their work is the amazing courtship displays of the tiny male spiders, the study of which offers insights into the evolutionary origin of species.  Jonah says their research "is fundamentally driven by questions about speciation: the process of how new species emerge over time and how we get biological diversity." Joana adds: “We are seeking to explain why some biological lineages have become extremely diverse with many species while other lineages have remained comparatively species-poor, using the peacock spider, amongst other animals, as study organisms.”

The Sanger Institute’s Tree of Life Programme, which is a leading contributor to the Earth BioGenome Project, uses DNA sequencing to study biodiversity and generate novel insights for nature conservation and society. 

Recording the diversity of species, and unravelling how life on Earth became so diverse is important both to conservation, and to protect the amazing variety of life on this planet.

Read more: 

Tiny dancers: Work to glean evolutionary insights from charismatic spiders featured by BBC News. (Corpus Christi College website) 

BBC News item on peacock spiders

Image: Joana, Joseph, and Jonah using a laser vibrometer on a custom set-up to record peacock spiders’ dancing vibrations. Photo: Damian Elias