Taxon sampling
Stasimopus specimens were collected from part of the Great Karoo,
South Africa. The area is within the demarcated area for potential shale
gas fracking. The boundary of the area is set approximately by the
following coordinates: -30.88688, 26.29295 and -33.03079, 20.01661
(Figure 1). Sites were selected by the Karoo BioGaps team to cover the
range of environmental conditions present in the region and within each
site drainage line habitats were targeted for sampling as they are
favoured by trapdoor spiders. Stasimopus specimens were collected
at 55 sites. At each site four people spent one-hour, thereby four
man-hours soil scraping. Soil scraping involves removing the top layer
of soil to expose burrow entrances. Once entrances were exposed, the
burrows were excavated using a hand shovel, taking care to not injure
the specimens. This methodology was effective for collecting female and
juvenile specimens. In order to collect male specimens, road cruising
was done after rain in the evenings. This involves slowly driving on
isolated roads with torches to find males which are crossing in search
of potential mates. All specimens were preserved in a solution of cold
alcohol and kept in an ice box. Specimens were later preserved in 80%
ethanol in glass polytop vials for long term storage. All locality
information is available in Table S1. All newly collected material was
deposited in the National Collection of Arachnida (NCA) of the
Agricultural Research Council (ARC), Roodeplaat, South Africa.