New trapdoor species found in urban Qld

It's taken years of work by a team at Queensland Museum to uncover the five species found in the inner city to the bayside suburb of Burbank and further afield to the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast hinterlands.

Lead author Jeremy Wilson says the discovery combined fieldwork across Greater Brisbane with genetic research.

"I'm not sure how they became known as golden trapdoors as very few are truly golden," Dr Wilson said.

"That said, they are a remarkable group of spiders and are very interesting in that they are so varied, from being very spiny to being quite large - some of them have bodies that are around four centimetres in length."

The work of a taxonomist, who groups organisms into categories, was similar to a detective, co-author Michael Rix said.

"We have been working on this project for a few years, as a number of these species look very similar and live near each other, which meant we had to compare a large amount of evidence to describe these five new species," Dr Rix said.

"When we describe a new species we need to consider their morphology or what they look like, but also compare their DNA to see how similar genetically they are, and then of course where they are found."

The discovery is important as scientists work to protect species living in urban environments around Brisbane.

"The first step to conserving any species is scientifically naming it, as we cannot protect something if we don't know it exists in the environment," Dr Rix said.

Trapdoor spiders are known to make a "plug-door" burrow made out of soil and silk that sits flush with the surrounding soil when closed.

The new species were recently described in the journal Invertebrate Systematics.

Australian Associated Press