In Tolima, Colombia, a spider the size of a fingernail has been living on building walls, eating disease-carrying insects, and minding its own business for years without a name. Scientists remedied that recently, and they went with Pikelinia floydmuraria. Yep, after Pink Floyd.
The name is a two-for-one. “Floyd” honors the band, while “muraria” comes from the Latin word for wall—a nod to both the spider’s habitat and the 1979 album The Wall. The researchers even titled their paper, published in Zoosystematics and Evolution, “Another Web in the Wall.” See? Academics can be funny when they want to be.
Beyond the naming, the spider is worth paying attention to. P. floydmuraria measures 3 to 4 millimeters long, which makes it roughly the size of a sesame seed, and has been observed taking down prey up to six times its own body size. Its diet runs heavy on flies, ants, and beetles, including mosquitoes and houseflies—the exact insects that make city life miserable. They have a good strategy, too. These spiders build their webs near artificial lights, exploiting the tendency of flying insects to cluster around them, essentially turning streetlights into a buffet delivery system. Researchers recorded densities of 20 to 30 individuals per square meter in some areas. Most people walk right past them.
Someone Tell the band About the Pink Floyd Spider
The study also pulled back the curtain on how little science actually knows about this group. P. floydmuraria is only the second species of its genus ever recorded in Colombia, and three additional unidentified populations turned up in other Colombian departments during the research. Only 20 species of this spider group are currently recognized across all of South America—meaning the actual number is almost certainly higher, and researchers are barely scratching the surface.
There’s also a strange geographic subplot buried in the paper. A closely related species, Pikelinia fasciata, lives exclusively in the Galápagos Islands, over a thousand miles away across the Pacific Ocean and the Andes. The two species look nearly identical. Whether that’s shared ancestry or parallel evolution, researchers say, is still an open question that DNA analysis will eventually need to answer.
P. floydmuraria has a name, a paper, and a legacy that most spiders will never come close to. Roger Waters could not be reached for comment.
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