Exhibition: “Shedding light on the Worldʼs darkest biodiversity hotspot”
Continuous darkness in caves hides some strange and interesting creatures for the world of science. More than a hundred endemic species of cave-dwelling spiders in the Dinaric Alps -a region with a large cave-dwelling biodiversity on Earth- are the stars of the new temporary exhibition in the Animal Biodiversity Resource Center (CRBA).
Depigmentation, and eye reduction, alongation of body appendices and presence of sensory hairs are traits of these cave-dwelling species, which also show low metabolic rates and live longer than their non-cave relatives.
The CRBA exhibition goes through twenty years of research on cave-dwelling animals carried out by the Croatian Biospeleological Society, with the contribution of Martina Pavlek, a young researcher with a Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant at the University of Barcelona. Pavlek's work, which aims to document and study the effects of climate change on the cave-dwelling fauna, is part of the project HiddenLife, funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 program. This research activity has been carried out in the laboratory led by professor Miquel Àngel Arnedo, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute of the UB (IRBio).