Known by many names, including Camel Spiders and Roman Spiders - my favourite is Sun Spider. As a child we would encounter them in wild spaces, screeching as they zipped across the ground, often over our bare little feet.

They are in fact not spiders, and their impressive features, particularly their jaws, belie how harmless they are. I would not recommend touching them or picking them up because those mandibles are quite impressive, and touching any wild animal risks harm and disrespects their right to be left alone.

We encountered this impressive animal on a dog walk in a nature space that is being disrespected and threatened around the corner from where I live. Very old indigenous, and in some cases, rare and endangered tree species, are being cut down for fire wood, stripped of their bark for medicinal purposes, and generally treated like a human resource without regard for their right to be treated with respect.

In the background you can hear an off-road motorbike speeding through the area, potentially encountering and killing an animal like this. Motorists drive into the veld without regard for the smaller creatures they may kill in the process, including hedgehogs, ground bird's eggs, and wild rabbits.

Developers plan to turn this area into high-density urban dwellings, and already government has destroyed part of this wild area when they built Home Affairs across the road, killing a large quantity of small wildlife in the process.

Equally urban visitors to this area fail to consider their impact on the resident animal and plant wildlife. As regular walkers we watch the daily onslaught of human narcissism and care-less-ness on this precious piece of indigenous veld.

Can we please stop and consider this moment in our human story? Let's think about the world we've forgotten, the one we treat so care-less-ly, the one we rely on to survive and thrive on this planet. The Garden of Eden is not some mythical biblical location on this earth, it is earth itself, and we are treating it shamefully.

Accommodating and respecting nature requires us to rethink and redesign how we engage our earth. We can accommodate the species that occupy spaces around us by thinking a lot more carefully about what their value is in our world, and redesigning how we move through, and live, in their habitats - how we value their existence alongside ours.

In all the years that we've visited this space, we've never witnessed this animal. It is a great honour to have encountered this magnificent fellow earthling, and a great sadness that those who develop our cities plan to destroy their right to life without a second thought.

Instead of destroying this space, why not protect and rehabilitate it - using it to educate city dwellers on how to support indigenous wildlife in their own backyards, on their balconies and window sills, in their homes? How amazing would it be for city kids to be able to come camping here, being taught about indigenous trees and wildlife in the process? How amazing would it be if we were taught how to treat nature with respect?

Our world won't change unless we change it. So, let's educate ourselves about the life that surrounds us, and start to treat them like our closest and dearest friends, family and neighbours.

Loving and respecting all life and the habitats that sustain it, is an act of self-love. If we don't wake up to this reality, we will continue to destroy the future of these incredible beings, as well as our own.

Our ancestors lived closely to nature, understood their place in it, and are turning in their graves at how we're treating each other and our only home, our earth.

Order Solifugae. Family Solpugidae

Solpugidae (Common Romans)

All species in the sub-region belong to the subfamily Solpuginae. Tarsal segments numbering 1,4,4,7. Flagellum short to long, whip-like but often thickened or branched.

Most recogniseable genera:

Solpugema (legs with minute accessory spines, giving them a much more finely-furred look right to their claws). Some Solpugema (of the 'hostilis' group) are distinctive having bright red hind legs.

Zeriassa (small, more or less hairless, often purple, with two long, forward-pointing bristles between the eyes)

Solpugiba (pedipalps very short, body often with longitudinal stripes).

Zeria and Solpuga are very common.

Find out more about them here:
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