Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
dots. The legs are a uniform light yellow-brown and covered in long hairs, with two rows of long con-
spicuous hairs on the underside. The double row of hairs is particularly conspicuous in the female.
The original specimen was found in a deep accumulation of drift material on the sandy foreshore of
Berges Island, a small extension of sand dunes from Whiteford Burrows, but further searching failed to
locate specimens in the drift material. Only in 1967 was it realised that the searching was being under-
taken in the wrong area. Instead it was decided to look at some of the adjoining habitats, and large num-
bers of immature specimens were found in the vegetation on the higher parts of the salt marsh, occurring
only in a narrow band dominated by sea rush and red fescue. Later the spider was also found in a small
estuarine marsh on the north side of Oxwich National Nature Reserve. In the mid-1990s surveys revealed
that the spider was actually quite widely distributed, although extremely local in its occurrence, on purple
moor-grassdominatedfensinlowlandWalesandNorfolk.Itsecologicalrequirementsarenotunderstood,
however, and its full distribution in Britain is not yet clear.
