michael-gasteracantha

Unido: 21.ene.2019 Última actividad: 17.mar.2024 iNaturalist

Since I was a young boy I have always been fascinated by spiders. I watched them, I took pictures of them and I was interested what Latin name was the right one for every single species I found in the nature. But at that time, in 80's in my country Poland, I had still no idea about the real diversity of these animals. Poland has something about 750 species only and that was not enough for me. Consequently over the years I stopped to collect spiders from Europe only any my interest focused on the spiders of the world. I created my own spider catalog, splited in all described families and containing pictures for nearly every single genus for each family. Now i have over 80.000 pictures collected from the Internet and every possible source I was able to find.
With yeras it was to time consuming to include inside every taxonomic change and to follow permanently every additional news, provided in World Spider Catalog. Especially after working on Salticidae and Theraphosidae it was enough for me so I started to define my hobby in a new way. Araneidae become my biggest interest ever with main focus on the genus Micrathena and the subfamily Gasteracanthinae.
Now I'm working on the revision of the genus Gasteracantha, together with my very good friend from Oxford and with kindly help offered by some museums, like the Natural History Museum in Vienna or in London. I thank everybody who support my work. Using my knowledge and infomation collected over 20 years, I hope to contribute something here and to help to the science.

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