The Spiders of Galiano Island

Last updated May 2022

To date our community has documented a total of 59 species of spiders (Order: Araneae) for Galiano Island, confirming 36% of the historical records and adding 49 new species to the list. A total of 75 species are now reported for the island.

With 409 species known within the Georgia Depression (Copley et al. unpublished data) and 859 species reported for British Columbia (Bennett et al. 2017), our dataset represents a small fraction of the total spider diversity reported for our region. If you would like to contribute to our knowledge of Galiano Island’s spiders, please add your observations to the Biodiversity Galiano project. Because spider taxonomy often relies on the study of minute sexual characters, however, it is often necessary to collect specimens to identify them to species. Even then, they must be sexually mature! Spiders are also sexually dimorphic, so you can expect a fair amount of morphological variation in a given species. For more information on spider identification and collection, please don’t hesitate to contact the project curator.

Below you can explore a data visualization showing the species reported for Galiano. Click the links to view local Galiano island-based observations of species documented so far.

Our community is especially indebted to Robb Bennett, Darren Copley and Claudia Copley at the Royal BC Museum for their support of this project.