One of the world’s rarest spiders has been given a fighting chance of survival, after an appeal by developers to be allowed to build new houses in an old quarry was dismissed earlier today.
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The Horrid ground weaver (Nothophantes horridus) is a tiny money spider which has only been found in three sites in Plymouth, nowhere else in the world, and one of those sites has already been built on and lost.
Proposals to build a new development of 57 new houses on the second site, Radford Quarry – also a County Wildlife Site – would have destroyed the spider’s habitat and pushed it closer to extinction.
Independent experts at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) rated the spider as Critically Endangered and added it to the global Red List of Threatened Species.
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