INVASION ONTOLOGIES - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 186

to describe the vast majority of arthropods, just as 'reptile' had long signified all
manner of unclean 'creeping things that creep along the earth' aspersed by Leviticus
11:29. Nevertheless, by 1870, P¯keh¯ usage of the 'katipo' clearly denoted the same
spider described by M¯ori.
Furthermore, after this date a growing number of international medical and
entomological texts cited the katipo as one of the world's few deadly spiders (Blyth,
1884: 447-448; Hirst, 1917: 10). As early as 1877, antipodean readers were
outraged to find that the Belfast Weekly News was discouraging potential emigrants
on account of the katipo, which was reputed to pose 'a great drawback to the
enjoyment of life in New Zealand' (Anon, 1877b: 2). That same year, it was
reported that 'the katipo of New Zealand seems to have made its appearance in
North America, and great consternation has been the consequence'. Indeed, after
specimens were apparently identified in Central Park, New York readers were
informed that this spider inspired 'the dread of European immigrants and Maoris
alike, and all observers unite in declaring that it is as deadly as the rattlesnake, or
even as the nightmare of India - the cobra di capella' (Anon, 1877a: 3).
In the Australian colonies, however, there was almost no Aboriginal animus
towards indigenous spiders or their bite, nor any specific word to describe the
species now called the redback. Snell, after all, referred to his specimen only by its
coloration and reputed venomousness, suggesting that in 1850 it had no common
moniker. From the 1860s popular names began to proliferate, including the 'red-
spotted', 'red-striped', 'red-back', 'black and red', 'jockey' or simply 'venomous'
spider. Furthermore, after 1870, both local and international observers came
increasingly to label the Australian Latrodectus simply a variety of the katipo (for
instance, Karsch, 1884: 341). In this sense, the New Zealand species discursively
invaded the Australian colonies.
Indeed, it was only in 1870 that both the katipo ( Latrodectus katipo ) and the
redback - then labelled Latrodectus scelio - were formally described in the taxonomic
literature (Powell, 1870: 58; Thorell, 1870: 369-374). Sadly the katipo type
specimen has since been lost, but the archetypal redback still lurks inside London's
Natural History Museum. Within biological discourse, one would typically state
that 1870 thus represents the year in which the identities of both of these spiders
became fixed. This is of course a simplistic assertion. Biologically, animal identities
remain perpetually open to reorganisation and reclassification, from re-sketched
cladograms to putative epigenomic maps. Culturally, attributes such as 'dangerous-
ness' are constantly renegotiated in relation not merely to human experience, but
to a matrix of animal interrelations (Hobbins, 2013).
But what of the period prior to 1870? Arthropods, especially specimens from
the Anthropocene, are poorly served by the Australian fossil or archaeological
record. Moreover, zooarchaeologists focus primarily on calcified artefacts reflecting
human diets, such as fish bones and shell middens. Few pre-contact arthropod
remains exist, given their chitinous exoskeletons and the ephemerality of soft tissues
and bodily fluids like venom. While the reconstitution of biological molecules,
including DNA and venom proteins, is technically feasible if samples can be