There’s barely a college town in the world that isn’t alive at night with boys looking to meet girls. That’s true in Auburn, Alabama, home of the famous Auburn Tigers, and that’s true even when the boys and girls are spiders. In 2012, scientists at the school’s Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology got curious about the unusual male spiders always turning up on the sidewalks and in the garages and swimming pools of greater Auburn during the breeding months of November and December. They studied the arachnids and learned that they indeed represented something new. The Trapdoor part of the species’ name comes from the females, since they spend most of their lives lurking in burrows covered by trapdoors made of soil and silk. The Auburn mascot is responsible for the Tiger part of the name. But the new spider will likely never be the most cleverly named species in its genus. That honor belongs to the Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi, named in 2007 for, yes, that other great, gnarled natural wonder: Neil Young.
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