The watchers of Koi Kyenunu-ruff

DR KARLENE BAIN, a wildlife ecologist with nearly three decades of experience, is joyously at home in the bush. Picture her striding and climbing among the peaks and gullies of Koi Kyenunu-ruff (the Stirling Range) as she researches ancient Cataxia spiders. She calls them ‘the watchers’. With reverence, Karlene shares both her deep knowledge of these small creatures and their massive story, from their primeval spider ancestors during the age of dinosaurs and beyond, to the present day threat of frequent, intense fires.

September 2025

Long before humans stood upright, long before the first mammal blinked into the sunlight, and even before dinosaurs thundered across the lush floodplains of the ancient, southern supercontinent Gondwana, there were the watchers. Still, silent, and patient, nestled in cool, shaded soils. Among them was her ancestor, a spider with no need for haste, no yearning for distance, just the damp comfort of home and the quiet rhythm of time.

The lineage she belongs to was already old when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Her earliest kin, small and dark-eyed like her, once crept silently beneath the shadow of ferns, ancient conifers, and clubmosses, in forests thick with the breath of a warm, humid sky. They were ambush predators even then, lying in wait within burrows, beneath leaves and loam, striking with fangs of folded steel. Her ancestors didn’t travel. They didn’t need to. They lived quietly and waited. That was the way of her kind. Wait, strike, and disappear again. No other creature noticed them. That’s how they survived.  

Then the supercontinent cracked! First, Africa and South America began their slow departure, tearing open the new Atlantic Ocean. Her ancestors burrowed deep in the soil that would one day be Western Australia. Later, India wrenched northward, parting from Antarctica in a long, grinding farewell. The ancient lines of spider kin she belonged to started to fracture, each isolated on shifting continents, unable to cross seas they could neither see nor comprehend. The world changed.

By the time the great Cretaceous seas spread across what is now the southern coast of Western Australia, her ancestors were already nestled in what would become one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. Mountains were rising. Faults buckled and cracked as the last bonds between Australia and Antarctica wrenched apart. Crust sagged and seas spilled into the fractures, washing over vast tracts of country, turning slopes into shorelines and ridgelines into islands. One such chain of peaks would become known eons later as Koi Kyenunu-ruff (the Stirling Range). Formed from ancient seabeds over a billion years ago, folded and uplifted in deep time, these mountains offered shelter when the lowlands drowned. Each of the peaks rose like islands above the salty tides, their gullies collecting mist, their soils holding tight to moisture. As the sea level rose during the Eocene, these mountain peaks became refuges for those unable to swim, fly, or flee. Her world shrank.

As the seas retreated once more in the Miocene, they left behind a land drier than before. The wet forests of her ancestors gave way to sclerophyll woodlands and open shrublands, bristling with hardy plants, forged by drought and fire. Yet in the creases of the land, small fragments of the old world endured. Mesic pockets clung to shaded gullies and southerly slopes; cool, damp enclaves spared from the harshness above. And in these quiet havens remained the watchers: silent, dark-eyed spiders with no tolerance for heat or sun. In their gully refuges, walls of green pressed close. Dense sedges crowded the wet soil near flowing creek lines and waterfalls, their arching blades woven into mats that glisten with dew. Above them, pale-stemmed thickets of moisture-loving plants rose and tangled, their branches knitting into a dense screen that filtered the light into a soft, green haze. The forest floor was thick with leaf litter, damp and fragrant, its surface scattered with fungi, fallen branches, and the slow, steady work of decay. Moisture clung to everything, to the ferns along the shaded banks, to the roots that braided through loamy soil, to the moss that softened stone. It was a place untouched by the searing light above. A world apart. A hidden remnant of the age before.

For millions of years, the southern gullies of the high peaks of Koi Kyenunu-ruff remained refugia. Cool, wet sanctuaries in an increasingly dry and fire-prone world. She survived here not by adapting to change, but by holding onto what little remained of the old world. As time passed, populations of her kind that were isolated on different peaks evolved into distinct species. She needed no name, but humans gave her one, Cataxia, and time, working hand in hand with isolation, shaped her lineage into four distinct forms within Koi Kyenunu-ruff: Cataxia sandsorum, Cataxia stirlingi, Cataxia colesi, and Cataxia barrettae.

She is not alone. Other families of her spider ancestors walked the same long path through deep time. Their lineages too were splintered, scattered, and stranded by shifting climates and rising ridges. Humans named them Bertmainius, Proshermacha and Teyl.

Families of ancient land snails, velvet worms, and pseudoscorpions live out parallel stories across these old, folded ranges, descendants of creatures that once roamed the lush, connected forests of Gondwana. From single threads of ancestry have emerged unique species, each now woven into the cracks and crevices of individual mountains. Each found nowhere else.  

And here, in the present, she remains. Deep in the shadows at the base of old rock cairns, where soft, damp soil weaves between the rocks, she lives in a burrow, large for her kind, like a doorway to another world. Around its rim, a delicate palisade of leaves, twigs, and silk rises like the turrets of a miniature castle. Her burrow curves downward beneath the cool surface, following minute crevices between rocks, forming its steady pocket of temperature and moisture. She built it long ago, as a spiderling no larger than a matchhead, fresh from the maternal chamber. It has grown with her, widening and deepening as she matured, hollowing over time like memory. She is old now, a matriarch of her family, and no longer produces eggs. But she does not leave. She has never left. Her lungs, delicate as tissue, cannot endure dry heat for long. She emerges only when the mountains are shrouded in mist, or after the autumn rains soak the ground. When the soil softens and the air thickens, the moisture allows her to breathe and her limbs to move.

Around her, her daughters live in similar homes. Smaller palisades scattered through the moist soils in the shadows of rocks, roots, in moist creek banks and beneath low, dry shrubs. Each of them hatched from eggs laid in a silk-wrapped chamber deep within her burrow. After emerging, they stayed close, most moving less than a metre through the damp autumn soil before turning downward and carving out spaces of their own. Now, the spiderlings of her daughters begin to stir. They surface briefly in autumn to test the air, then retreat, waiting for the rains that will soften the ground enough for their first steps outward. They are clumsy, slow-footed dispersers, and like their mothers, they seldom travel far. Around the maternal burrows, they build a scattered constellation of tiny palisades, an ever-expanding arc of kin.

She is surrounded mostly by daughters. Her sons survive only six years before instinct drives them upward, out of their burrows, into the dark autumn night in search of a mate. They do not return. Their bodies feed the new life they help to create. She feels them leave. She senses her kin more than she sees them, woven around her like a web with no visible strands. Around her, her daughters endure, their palisades and burrows growing year by year, season by season. The constellation holds. Life continues.

But the world is shifting once again, this time not through the slow gears of plate tectonics but the feverish haste of human industry. The changes now come faster than stone can shift. The rainfall no longer arrives as it once did, gentle, soaking, predictable. Summers stretch out longer, autumns stay dry, winters shrink. The wet-season refuge of her burrow grows shorter, the soil around it harder and drier. The moist gullies shrink further each year. Her daughters’ spiderlings, if they hatch at all, find it hard to find soft, moist soils to burrow into and they do not always survive their first summer. And then there is the fire.

For millennia, fire came rarely to Koi Kyenunu-ruff, especially to the ancient refugia where the spiders dwelled. The vegetation there was not immune to flame, but the deep gullies held moisture year-round, and fires that raged along the open, dry ridgelines often faltered when they reached the damp, shaded slopes below. The fires that passed through infrequently, left a patchwork of scorched and spared. The spiders, sealed deep within their burrows, could usually endure the flames that swept across the surface. Their palisades would char and collapse, but the sedge and shrub cover often persisted in patches, offering shade and shelter from the post-fire heat and dryness. Beneath the earth, they waited. And as the vegetation slowly returned, so too did the rhythm of life.

But now the fires are hotter. And they come more often. In just two decades, intense fires have torn through the gullies three times, charring and killing plants and killing millions of her kin. These fires move with terrifying speed, driven by hot, dry, and windy weather systems; by steep slopes that preheat the land ahead of the flames; and by the parched vegetation, desiccated by years of drying climate. The heat is now so intense that, in places, the soil itself smoulders, burning deep into the root layer. Shallow burrowing members of her family are killed immediately by the radiant heat, usually young spiders that haven’t reached maturity. Millions more perish in the weeks and months that follow, as bare soils are scorched by unrelenting sun; water erodes soil as it runs off steep slopes with nothing to slow or hold it; and burrows, once shaded by dense vegetation, are left exposed. Hungry predators easily locate the survivors. In a single intense fire, many of the delicate survivors of a hundred million years are gone, and the subsequent fires add to that loss.

Where once her kind formed a tight constellation of palisades, housing millions of individuals scattered across each mountain, now only tens of thousands remain, living in isolated clusters. Each year, there are fewer males for her daughters to mate with. Fewer young survive past dispersal. Species that once spanned a wide arc of mountaintop habitat are now broken into fragments, some reduced to patches no larger than a few square metres. Genetic isolation seeps in slowly and invisibly, bringing with it the insidious threats of inbreeding, disease, and the unforgiving maths of too few individuals. For a creature that cannot move far and with its long maturation period, extinction doesn’t need to chase. It only needs to wait for the weather to shift, for another fire to come, for the daughters to grow old and become matriarchs who can no longer produce eggs. And then a population with no young, no sons, no future.

Even the high peaks, once buffered by elevation and the cooling folds of topography, no longer escape the flames. Lightning storms are more frequent, summer thunderclouds roll in without rain, lashing ridgelines with fire. And even where the fires do not reach, the heat does. The dry air presses in. The heavy mists still drift in, though less often now, and they do not linger as long. Without their blanket, the sky islands shed their moisture more quickly; the cool, moist refuges in the south-facing gullies are shrinking, slowly gnawed by drought and heat.

And so, she waits. Still and quiet. A little deeper now. Her kind are older than most creatures alive today. She carries forward a legacy that is longer than any bird or mammal alive. Her own life might span up to 40 years if she is lucky, but her ancestry spans several hundred million years. She has seen many summers, but never so dry. Never so many days when the soil doesn’t sweat, when the earth above feels dead. She waits for the return of the rain, for the tremble of softened earth, the coolness seeping through the walls of her burrow, the shift in pressure that signals moisture above. She waits for the taste of damp through the soil, the chance to rebuild her family.

From above the soil

The first time I saw her burrow in 2002, it looked like nothing more than a small ring of leaves and twigs pressed into the damp earth, the kind of thing easily missed among the debris of the gully floor. But the symmetry caught my eye. My mentor Barbara York Main pointed it out and I crouched down to rest a hand on the cool moss-covered stone beside it, admiring the elaborate arrangement of leaves, twigs and flowers. When the light shifted, there was the faint glimmer of silk binding the leaves together. The opening was a perfect circle, descending into shadow and I saw the gentle movement of legs shifting deeper as I peered into the dark depths.

For twenty-three years I have regularly returned to her and her kin, after fire had blackened the slopes, through summers when the earth cracked with thirst, and in winters when rains had been so heavy the gullies roared, the soil shifting and swelling, sometimes burying or flooding burrows. Each journey became a ritual. I would step off the track, scaling steep gullies and tracing the southern slopes, covering 250 kilometres as I threaded my way over the rugged terrain, eyes glued to the soil beneath my feet, searching. I counted burrows as others might count their treasures, each one a fragile stronghold of life, precious beyond measure.

In those early days, my records filled pages. My journeys led me past tumbling waterfalls, vast rock pools, fast-flowing creeks, and through dense, tangled vegetation. More than once, I found myself hanging by a single hand from a sheer rock face, the other outstretched to measure the still doorway of a burrow, and thinking if I fall here, no one will ever find me. No mobile phones or SPOT Finders. Back then, burrows clustered close, a secret city of silk and leaves, and I had to tread with care, reverently, so as not to crush the delicate palisades. I imagined the hidden network beneath my feet, the quiet lives unfolding out of sight.

I often spoke to the spiders, though I knew they could not understand. “You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?” I’d murmur, kneeling in the leaf litter. Sometimes I’d press a fingertip to the soft leaves near the burrow entrance, fancying that I was communicating with them that way, through the silken threads weaving outwards.

On my most recent visit in 2024, I had to climb and walk for hours to find a single palisade and felt grief as I stood where whole clusters of spiders had once lived. There had been intense fires a few years prior, and while some vegetation had recovered, the gullies that had once been lush and green were still starkly black and charred, their soils cracked, dry, and exposed. Climbing was treacherous over steep slopes of shifting rock and mobile soil, a fragile, unsettled landscape. I knew that many of the Cataxias had been lost, and I moved carefully, documenting every surviving burrow with painstaking attention. The numbers were brutal: a staggering 98% decline in burrow counts since my first surveys in 2002.

Each survey has been telling the same story: fewer palisades, smaller clusters, more blank spaces where life once was. I always imagined my work as documenting survival, but now it feels more like recording a slow erasure. Watching is not enough. Something has to change, not just here in the gullies, but far beyond, in the places where funding is allocated and priorities are set by people who have never walked these slopes. The story of the watchers must be told loudly to move resources, policy, and will.

There is still hope. We can safeguard the last refuges of these fragile spiders and the many other short-range endemics that share their hidden homelands. We can reconnect fragmented populations, restore corridors between isolated pockets, and deepen our understanding of the microclimate and microhabitat conditions they depend on. This means committing to careful fire management that honours the delicate rhythms of these ecosystems, nurturing the slow recovery of native vegetation and soil, and enhancing post-fire microhabitats to soften the drying edge of an opened landscape. Long-term watching of the watchers must continue to guide our actions and help us learn what these ancient survivors need. Only through this blend of knowledge, care, and commitment can we hope to keep the watchers waiting, not for extinction, but for the return of rain and renewal. Their survival is a fragile thread woven through time, and our actions now will determine whether that thread endures or unravels.

WARM THANKS to Karlene Bain for the story and photographs. Editing by Gondwana Link’s Margaret Robertson and Keith Bradby. This story is also published in the September 2025 edition of the Southerly Magazine, pp. 22-27.

Further reading

Bain, K., Comer, S., and Main, B. Y. (In Press) Cataxia on the edge: Range contraction of montane mygalomorphs. Austral Entomology.

Rix, M.G., Bain, K., York Main, B., Raven, R.J., Austin, A.D., Cooper, S.J.B., and Harvey, M.S. (2017). Systematics of the spiny trapdoor spiders of the genus Cataxia (Mygalomorphae: Idiopidae) from south-western Australia: documenting a threatened fauna in a sky-island landscape. Journal of Arachnology: JoA-S-17-012R1.