Naiveté and Novel Perturbations: Conservation of Native Spiders on an Oceanic Island System

Abstract

The native fauna of isolated island systems is generally unique with acute conservation issues. For spiders in Hawaii, the first impediment to effective conservation is lack of taxonomic knowledge. The primary conservation concerns are related to the highly localized areas of endemicity of many species, with associated small population sizes. Species on insular systems tend to occur naturally in small populations, and small population size itself may not be a cause for conservation concern. However, for spiders and other arthropods, which tend to have shorter generation times compared to vertebrates, population fluctuations will tend to be more frequent, rendering them more vulnerable to extinction through demographic accidents at small population size. The knowledge we have to date suggests that habitat disturbance and alien species invasion are probably the major factors affecting native spiders in the islands. For a given natural community, the ability of species to accommodate habitat perturbation may be related more to the novelty of the perturbation than to its apparent severity. Although native spiders appear to tolerate disruption of the species composition of the native vegetation, evidence suggests that they are severely impacted by alien arthropod predators, in particular social hymenoptera, a group not represented among native Hawaiian arthropods.