IWN Report — Friday, 31 July 2026
Scientists have discovered three new spider species in India this July: one in a cave in Meghalaya, one in a forest canopy in Andhra Pradesh, and one in a stretch of grassland in Maharashtra.
Two of the three come from the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI), the country’s oldest taxonomic institution. The third comes from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). Between them, the three finds add to how little of India’s smallest wildlife has been formally catalogued.
Slingshot Silk
Inside Krem Lawbah cave in Meghalaya, ZSI researchers Supradipta Dutta, Rajib Goswami, Puthoor Pattammal Sudhin, Souvik Sen and Dhriti Banerjee found a spider barely 2mm long, small enough to vanish into a fingerprint. They named it Simonia lawbah, the first confirmed record of the genus Simonia anywhere in India.
The spider belongs to the ray spider family, Theridiosomatidae, and builds a cone-shaped web that it holds taut like a drawn bowstring. When an insect blunders in, it releases the tension and the web snaps forward, flinging silk at the prey rather than simply trapping it. Living permanently in the cave’s darkness, it is what biologists call troglophilic: adapted to cave life, but not entirely incapable of surviving outside it.
Canopy Hunter
The second spider was found in the forest canopy of Papikonda National Park, an Eastern Ghats reserve along the Godavari in Andhra Pradesh. Hamataliwa papikonda is a lynx spider, family Oxyopidae, pale yellow and under 5mm long. It spins no web at all. It hunts the way its family name suggests, sprinting across bark and foliage on spiny legs and relying on speed rather than silk.
Its discovery is the first record of the genus Hamataliwa from Andhra Pradesh, extending a distribution map that, until this year, did not include the state.
Grassland Spider
The third find is from the semi-arid grasslands of Karjat tehsil, in Maharashtra’s Ahilyanagar district on the Deccan Plateau, where ATREE researchers Rishikesh Tripathi, Prasad Bolde and Abi Tamim Vanak found Tigidia singhal, a trapdoor spider that digs and lives in a burrow rather than spinning an open web. The paper, published in the journal Arachnology, is notable less for the spider itself than for where it was sitting: every previous Indian record of the genus Tigidia came from evergreen or deciduous forest. This one came from open, sun-baked grassland, habitat the genus was not previously known to use at all.
Grasslands across peninsular India have long been dismissed administratively as unproductive scrub, land worth converting rather than protecting. A burrowing spider quietly living there complicates that story.
Sources: Zoological Survey of India findings, via ETV Bharat · ATREE Press Coverage · Tripathi, Bolde & Vanak (2026), Arachnology 20(5): 749–752