Remote school students dig up the mystery of Maningrida's aquatic tarantulas
In 2015, headlines describing the stuff of horror movies brought the tiny town of Maningrida, population 2,000, to world attention.
International media outlets described the town, 500km east of Darwin, as being in the grip of a "mega cluster" of venomous tarantulas that can "rip open your skin".
The real story was much less dramatic, but so much about the lives of the large population of tarantulas that dive underwater remains a mystery to scientists that the local school has begun investigating.
The West Arnhem Land town sits near a floodplain believed to host the highest concentration of tarantulas in the world.
Unique aquatic tarantulas 'more like fish'
Queensland Museum arachnologist Robert Raven has described countless trapdoor funnel-webs and tarantulas and was gobsmacked by Maningrida.
Dr Raven surveyed the area when the species was discovered in 2006 and photographed 66 burrows over a few paces.
He said the spiders, which are believed to coat themselves with a thin, mercury-like layer of bubbles in order to breathe underwater, were incredibly unusual.
"They're in the wrong family to do this. They should be among the fish," Dr Raven said.
Years after the sensational headlines, and in part because the remote floodplain lies deep within wild buffalo and pig country, knowledge of the species remains patchy.
In fact, so little is known about the diving tarantula that the species still hasn't even been described.
Students take up scientific challenge
Robert Schonherr took up a post as a science teacher at Maningrida College early this year.
Tasked with teaching pupils about food chains, adaptation and evolution, he was looking for a project where students could apply the dense concepts.
"One of my colleagues said, 'You know what? My students actually discovered this species eight years ago'," he recalled.
"It's still an interesting species. How about you give it a go?"
Students now visit the habitat regularly to study the spiders.
They have replicated floodplains in the classrooms, filling glass tanks with water to see how the creatures respond.
Cameras reveal 'arachnophobe's worst nightmare'
Students used their ingenuity to lure the nocturnal spiders out of their twisting burrows, which can be up to a metre deep.
"[After digging the spiders out of the burrows], we found that if we dangled an insect inside, like a grasshopper on a little fishing line, the tarantula would actually grab the grasshopper and you can pull it out," Mr Schonherr said.
Advances in cheap, mobile technology recently led the students to a possible world first.
Using a an endoscope that attaches to Mr Schonherr's phone, students were able to feed cameras into the twisting burrows without having to destroy them.
The footage is a nightmare for arachnophobes.
"You have to fumble around a little bit until you find a spider, or in our case, slings — baby spiders. Spiderlings," Mr Schonherr said.
Pupils leading scientific research
The students are the only researchers regularly studying the species in their natural environment.
Mr Schonherr regularly reports back to Dr Raven, who said the pupils were leading biological research into the species.
One area of concern is what happens to the young.
"In one case we found the young in the sort of appendix in the burrow, but most of the time we didn't find anything but these big-sized females," Dr Raven said.
"That's a really big worry, because if we're only getting adults there, we don't know what's going on with the young or whether there's been recruitment going on in the population.
"In fact, we may come to a point in five or ten years time when all of a sudden there's none, so we have to find out what's going on."
Venom interests pharmaceutical researchers
The men also agree that the spider's venom is a potentially rich site of scientific research that could be used medicinally.
"A number of the spiders, because they have toxins, they can look at various aspects of them to see how they can play roles in improving pharmaceuticals that can be developed," Dr Raven said.
"We don't know where this could go, but it's good potential."
Today's students, however, may be middle-aged by the time anything reaches the market.
Such is the pace of this research that students Dr Raven supervised in 2006 now work as rangers on the same plains.
"What they figure out in Maningrida will tell us a lot about the spiders in the rest of Australia," the arachnologist said.
"Normally the big capital cities are leading the charge.
"Well, in this case, the Territory's got the best population of these things so it's a good place to start."