ISLAND CONSERVATION-Remembering the spider fanatic who loved Seychelles – Michael Saaristo (1938-2008) |19 May 2008

It was taken in March 1997 by Seychelles Nation photographer Louis Toussaint, who rushed over to Union Vale after Miggie Hermitte of SBC Radio discovered the spider feeding on the gecko on the trunk of a palm tree outside the radio production office at Union Vale. It appeared in the March 17th 1997 edition of this newspaper with the heading “Caught in the act!”.

I remember being on a training course in the Netherlands when SBC journalist Lucie Françoise sent me a copy of the photo obtained from Louis. The identity of the gecko itself was a puzzle. I noticed the tiny spines along the sides of the tail, and the small inner toes – characteristics, I realised later, of the barking gecko, which had not yet been reported from the granitic islands of Seychelles. Now, of course, we have got used to the “multiple chirp calls” of this notorious invasive species.

The spider, too, mystified me. I did not know then that five years earlier Ivan Ineich from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris had reported observing the same species feeding on a house gecko (lezar disik) on Mahé.  It was no less than the world’s top expert on Seychellois spiders, Michael Saaristo from Finland, who identified it for me – two years later. Michael arrived in Seychelles on New Year’s Day in 1999. The very next day we were in the high altitude forests of Mahé looking for spiders. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a cinnamon tree as we walked along a path in the vicinity of Le Niol. At the end of a branch a number of leaves had been rolled and bound together with silken strands.
 
“I know what this is,” I responded. “It’s the leaf shelter of a large spider, similar to the huntsman spider or bibouk that comes into houses, with long hairy reddish brown legs. It comes out of its retreat at night.”

“Well, that’s your gecko-eating spider,” Michael explained. “It’s actually also a huntsman spider. But this one is found only in Seychelles. Its scientific name is Rhitymna valida.”

Michael’s enthusiasm was infectious and I was eager to find out more. Later I read that the spider was first collected in 1867 by Edward Perceval Wright, who also “discovered” the bwa sitron or Wright’s Gardenia on Ile Aride and Félicité.
During our field trips at Mare aux Cochons, La Réserve and other parts of Mahé, Michael constantly drew my attention to fascinating aspects of spider biology: the small black jumping spiders that mimic ants; the “kleptoparasites” that don’t build their own webs but live in the webs of the large Nephila spiders; other spiders that deliberately place a dead leaf in the middle of their web as a sort of security chamber…

Names

I remembered all this recently when I received the sad news that Michael had died on April 27, at the age of 70, after a long battle with kidney cancer. His planned third trip to Seychelles was not to be. The first had been in October 1975, when he stayed at the Reef Hotel, then in its heyday. An obsessive collector, ever eager to find and identify as many species as possible before they disappear, Michael even caught spiders right inside his hotel room. On a table there he found a small male specimen, only 1½ millimetres long, that he thought was new to science. He published its description and named it Oecobius reefi – after the Reef Hotel! Unfortunately, the name is no longer valid: he later realised that his specimen was the male of a species of which the female had been discovered and named earlier – Maitreja marathaus from India, described since 1962.

The way Michael named new species of spiders showed his generous nature. The tiny Seychellia wiljoi, not even a millimetre in length, found among dead leaves at La Misère, bears the name of his uncle, Wiljo Saaristo, who sponsored his first trip to Seychelles. Other spider names are a testimony to the large number of friends and colleagues that Michael had here: Lionneta gerlachi (“a patronym in honour of the Chairman of the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles, Mr Ron Gerlach”) was found in leaf-litter on Silhouette; Orchestina maureen (“from the Christian name of Dr Maureen Kirkpatrick, who gave me much help during my arachnological excursion in Seychelles in 1999”) was discovered in moss by the side of the path at Mare aux Cochons; Orchestina justini (“named for my friend and skilled naturalist of Seychelles, Dr Justin Gerlach”) was collected among old stems of creepers on boulders at Anse Cimetière on Silhouette;  Lionneta veli (“named for Mr Terence Vel,  who collected invertebrates as a technician of the Birdlife Seychelles – now Nature Seychelles – Management of Avian Ecosystems Project”) was caught in pitfall traps on Curieuse and Grande Sœur…

Passion

In fact it is quite touching to imagine Michael in his laboratory at the Zoological Museum of the University of Turku, poring over spider specimens from all sorts of remote places in Seychelles, and obviously thinking about the naturalists and scientists who had found them. Very few people in Seychelles knew that far away in a port city on the Gulf of Bothnia in south-west Finland someone stricken by a deadly disease was fighting against time to study and document almost every spider known from here.

When Michael Saaristo first came to Seychelles in 1975, only 73 species of spider were known from our islands. Today, in large part thanks to his passion for our “arachnofauna”, the list stands at over 200. Little wonder that ecologists and conservationists await eagerly for his book on the spiders of Seychelles, to be published posthumously.

Michael’s hobbies in Finland included bird watching, gardening and fishing, but I suspect that even when involved in these activities he would pause to peer at any spider web he came across - to see, in the words of Mexican poetess Coral Bracho:

A little stream, drawn by the magnets of air and light,
and flowing like time, like copper forming,
is the thread
in a spider's web.
(Translated from the Spanish by Tom Boll and Katherine Pierpoint)

The Island Conservation Society promotes the conservation and restoration of island ecosystems.

By Pat Matyot