Aug. 6, 2013 — For biologists it is an easy matter: spiders have eight legs and insects have six. This fact is important when beholding and recognizing the tiny new species of Spider Water Beetles from the Philippine Island of Mindoro discovered by researchers of the Ateneo de Manila University.
Zookeys has published the paper about the curious creatures in its latest issue.
Primarily, the study was intended to find and describe the larvae of known species of the genus Ancyronyx, under which all Spider Water Beetles of the world are compiled. But when the researchers checked the pristine creeks and rivers of the ethnic Buhid's ancestral lands in the Municipality of Roxas, Oriental Mindoro, they found the first new species, now named as Ancyronyx buhid.
The second new species was detected among older collections of undetermined museum specimens. It was confirmed to occur in the waters of the famous Tamaraw Falls, a popular tourist destination in Puerto Galera, Oriental Mindoro. It was namedAncyronyx tamaraw after it's "type locality".
The newly discovered Buhid Spider Water Beetle has high potential to be used as a bioindicator species for healthy ecosystem conditions, since it fulfills the necessary criteria: it is surprisingly common in clean, pristine running waters all over Mindoro, but it is absent in more or less polluted and altered streams and it can easily be identified in larval and adult stages, by eye-catching color patterns.
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