Saaliga: A group of nature-lovers explore wonderful world of spiders, spread awareness

Mysuru:  We all habitually read about tigers, elephants and leopards as Mysuru is close to the Bandipur National Park and Nagarahole Tiger Reserve. But we rarely read about spiders. 

Spiders are wonderful creatures and their varied and complex range of behaviour and highly developed sensory systems are excellently adapted to the environmental conditions — as is proven by their evolutionary success. Over 400 million years, spiders have developed their sensory organs to a fascinating technical perfection and complexity.

A group of like-minded individuals in Mysuru, who have explored and done extensive work on spiders, has joined hands to spread awareness on spiders and the urgent need to protect them. They have formed ‘Team Saaliga’ (Saaliga means spider) in their effort to spread awareness and conserve this unique species — invertebrate creatures in the araneae order of the class arachnida in the phylum arthropoda where each spider has up to eight eyes, eight legs and seven silk-producing glands in its abdomen.

Team Saaliga comprises Dr. A.P.C. Abhijith, a homoeopathy doctor, organic farmer and a progressive agriculturist, Vipin Baliga, Sumukha Javagal, Pavan Ramachandra and Kiran Baagade. The team conducts exhibitions, awareness programmes, workshops and research on spiders. 

“We have been spreading the message on the need to conserve spiders by organising exhibitions and holding discussions and workshops. We have photographs of about 200 species of spiders that we have documented from Mysuru, Shivamogga and Kodagu,” Dr. Abhijith said. Workshops and programmes are held by the team in Mysuru, Kodagu, Chamarajanagar and Mangaluru. 

There are about 47,000 spider species across the world and generally people know only about the ones found in our homes. Even many entomology text books that have chapters about spiders have failed to recognise spiders as natural pest controller, he said. Team Saaliga has also published a book, ‘Backyard Spiders’, which featured 25 common species found around homes. 

There are a lot of similarities between humans and spiders like intelligence level, parental care and kleptoparasitic behaviour (parasitism by theft is a form of feeding in which one animal takes prey or other food that was caught, collected, or otherwise prepared by another animal, including stored food). 

Abhijith has the credit of identifying a new jumping spider. He, along with Dr. David E Hill from USA, collaborated to document the unique behaviour of a jumping spider called ‘Asemonea cf. Tenuipes’. This spider and its behaviour have been documented from field observations at Dr. Abhijith’s Indraprastha Organic Farm in Mysuru. Abhijith is the son of A.P. Chandrashekar, who is a household name in the organic community. 

The farm, located at Dadadahalli on the outskirts of the city, has 13 densely vegetated acres where there is a collection of more than 3,000 plant species including coconut, arecanut, banana and lot of wild trees and plants that are grown without any chemical insecticides or pesticides. 

The area is fully rain-fed with a lot of biomass containing several layers of compost materials. It is almost like a jungle with several feet high of biomass all over the place where Dr. Abhijith maintains a high-level of biodiversity.