But as the senior curator in a section of the museum with no junior curators, he tends to collect almost anything that can fit into a vial when he's out on a search expedition. For the next month, he'll have at least one more pair of helping hands on the continent. Drawing genitalia Vladimir Ovtsharenko is here from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to look for ground spiders. And this is the right time to do it. It's spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and the spiders are copulating.
Most spiders live only a year or so, molting five or six times before reaching maturity.
But only after that final molt can they be specifically identified. That's when the spider's genitalia is fully formed. Which may partly explain the shortage of spider biologists. An arachnologist must collect both an adult male and an adult female to be sure of the species. Shortly after molting, the spiders copulate.