Today's story is about spiders and the scientific names for plants and animals.


ROBERT RAVEN: It's the baseline of science, it's the collecting of data and unfortunately it is not sexy, it is not glamorous-type science. It's the hard, steady grind that Einstein spoke of when he talked about how he made his achievements.

JO-ANNE YOUNGLESON: Queensland spider expert Robert Raven is no stranger to that hard, steady grind. It's humid and hot on North Stradbroke Island, in Moreton Bay, and the whine of hundreds of mosquitoes can be heard in the still air. But Robert Raven continues undeterred.

Combing the undergrowth for the eight-legged creatures that are thriving on the island.

ROBERT RAVEN: One of the spiders I'm looking for is a spider that's known only from this side of the world and the closest relative is from South America in Chile suggesting this is the old Gondwanaland connection time, 30 or so million years. It's very rich and diverse in South America but so far we've not been able to find it here and now we've found it here it's really remarkable, a wonderful thing, an absolutely new new species, a new genus.

JO-ANNE YOUNGLESON: So far he and his colleagues from the Queensland Museum have discovered just a few of these tiny, elusive arachnids hiding in curled tree bark. Given Robert Raven's passion, it's surprising this spider wrangler admits to a childhood phobia.

ROBERT RAVEN: And that fear I still have and it's still with me but I have it under severe control except late at night after I've been working for a long period and then if I get disturbed by a spider when everything is over with I've done all my collecting then I completely lose it for a moment until I recognise who I am and what I should behave like.

JO-ANNE YOUNGLESON: Despite those fears, he plans to return to the North Stradbroke spider playground and Robert Raven will be searching for those elusive spiders as well as the much-needed research funding.

ROBERT RAVEN: A lot more money needs to be spent on base-level taxonomy. It's what we call the classification of animals; collecting, studying, naming and and so on. We've got a lot of people working already on these things but now we're finding for example the US are spending lots of money to come around the world to study spiders in this country as well as other countries so you know we're being put to shame by not studying our own fauna well enough.