A new spider found in a single patch of Idaho forest was named for the Vandals

Researchers at the University of Idaho have identified a spider species that appears to live nowhere else on Earth but a small pocket of mountain forest in the state’s north-central region. The team gave it a name that has nothing to do with Latin taxonomy and everything to do with school pride, tying a previously unknown predator to more than a century of campus history.

The discovery began, fittingly, as an accident. The researchers were not looking for a new species when they found one.

A Chance Find Near the Lochsa River

On Sept. 8, 2024, doctoral student Arnau Calatayud-Mascarell was surveying remote mountains near the town of Kooskia as part of his dissertation work tracking the distribution of spiders in the genus Microhexura, a group common across the Pacific Northwest. Former University of Idaho postdoctoral researcher Ethan J. Briggs, who was helping with the fieldwork, spotted something that looked off at a campground along the Lochsa River. It resembled a member of the genus Hexura, known previously from Oregon, Washington and British Columbia — but never from Idaho, according to the university’s account of the find.

Calatayud-Mascarell reached the same conclusion after examining the specimen, later saying the pair stopped caring about Microhexura entirely and had found something “way, way cooler.” The pair spent two more hours searching the campground before Calatayud-Mascarell texted his advisor, Chris Hamilton, an associate professor in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, saying he thought they had found Hexura. Hamilton, skeptical at first, changed his mind once he examined a specimen back in the lab.

Distinguishing the Idaho Spider From Its Coastal Relatives

Until this find, only two species in the genus Hexura were documented, both confined to coastal forests and mountains hundreds of miles away. The Idaho population turned out to be a third species, one that extends the known range of the genus by roughly 500 kilometers inland and represents the first new taxonomic work on this spider group in nearly 50 years, according to the research team’s published account.

The spider belongs to a small family of funnel-web mygalomorphs related to tarantulas, trapdoor spiders and Australian funnel-web spiders — the group Hamilton’s lab specializes in. Physically, the Idaho specimens proved visually distinct from their Pacific Northwest cousins even before genetic testing confirmed the split: they are roughly the size of a nickel, dark-colored, with three pairs of spinnerets and a shorter chelicerae than the two previously known species. That combination of visible and genetic evidence convinced the team the population had been isolated for a long time, likely walled off by mountains, elevation gradients and drying habitat outside a narrow band of moist forest.

Naming a Predator After the Vandals

Rather than reach for a Latin descriptor, the lab settled quickly on a name tied directly to the university itself: Hexura vandal. The nickname dates to 1917, when student journalist Harry Lloyd McCarty described the school’s basketball team as “vandalizing” its opponents, a label that stuck hard enough that the University of Idaho remains the only Division 1 program in the country using the Vandals as its mascot.

Hamilton said the choice felt obvious once the lab discussed it. “It’s black — sorry that it’s not black and gold like the school colors — it’s a predator that attacks. It’s a Vandal,” he said. Calatayud-Mascarell, an international student from Valencia, Spain, called the naming “the perfect ending” to his time at the university, adding that he expects the spider to remain part of the University of Idaho forever.

A Habitat Confined to One Small Patch of Forest

Since the initial encounter, the team has returned to the area multiple times, finding the spider in abundance within a core zone of moist, coniferous habitat with moss-covered ground and decaying logs — and then finding it abruptly absent once they moved into drier terrain nearby. That pattern has left Hamilton confident the species is genuinely restricted to Idaho, hemmed in by elevation, moisture gradients and, in places, river barriers.

The narrow range comes with risk attached. The region faces pressure from logging and increasingly frequent wildfires, which tend to strike during the spider’s breeding season. Researchers now consider the micro-endemic species likely endangered, and they hope the discovery builds a case for protecting the habitat that supports it. Idaho currently has no official state spider, and Hamilton has floated Hexura vandal — native to nowhere else and named for the state’s land-grant university — as a natural candidate.

Publishing the Find

Calatayud-Mascarell, Briggs and Hamilton, based in the university’s Department of Entomology, Plant Pathology and Nematology, published their formal description of the species Aug. 31 in the open-access journal ZooKeys. Hamilton said the find underscores how much remains undocumented even in a well-studied country, noting that people tend to assume the U.S. has been picked over thoroughly and that scientists already have a full accounting of its species — an assumption he called untrue. “This is a great example of that,” he said.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.

More from Morning Overview