Pictured: Professor Chen Jian, who has been engaged in spider research for 36 years
Professor Chen Jian exchanged research maps with the students
Students collect spiders from deciduous and topsoil
Chutian Metropolis Daily reporter He Jun correspondent Wu Shan
Photo: Huang Shifeng, reporter of Chutian Metropolis Daily
In American Hollywood blockbusters, "Spider-Man", who can shoot spider silk from between the wrists, is the embodiment of justice. In Hubei University, there is also a group of "Spider-Man", who have been collecting spiders for many years, and the arachnid research they have done is well-known in China, and Professor Chen Jian, 61, is one of the representatives. A few days ago, he was recommended by the school as a candidate for "Jingchu Good Teacher".
The seemingly ugly spider is Chen Jian's treasure. In the past 36 years, he has traveled all over the country in the footsteps of spider hunting, released more than 50 new species, trained generations of "Spider-Man" in Huda, and taken students to the wild to catch spiders, which is a "compulsory course" every summer. "How many species of spiders there are in our country are still unclear, and research on spiders has never stopped." From July 30 to August 25, he and three graduate students had been hunting spiders in the Wuling Mountains of Xiang'e and Hubei.
Master and apprentice 4 people deep in the mountains to catch spiders
During the field trip, the reporter contacted Professor Chen Jian several times at night, and during the day they were busy catching spiders in the mountains.
After arriving in Enshi on July 31, he and his students climbed all the way through The Xingdou Mountain in Lichuan, the Seven Sisters Mountain in Xuan'en, and the Huju Mountain in Shimen, Hunan, to the Five Peaks of Yichang. "This afternoon, most of the women's spiders we saw in the mountain forest were stick-lined bride spiders, and only two pairs were collected. On the evening of August 23, Chen Jian told reporters that he took students to catch spiders in the area of Fujiayan Bridge Village in Wufeng, Yichang, and the harvest was good in one day, and there were more than 200 spiders in the alcohol finger tube.
Female graduate student Zhong Rui is the first time to come out for a field trip, after adapting to the hard work of climbing mountains and mountains, she feels that there is still a lot of fun in doing this research. "This time I came out and saw a lot of trees with large nets, not like the webs of funnel spiders in general. We guessed and verified that it was composed of the filaments of caterpillars. Teacher Chen proposed to compare the ingredients with spider silk to see if this worm silk can be used. ”
Of course, there are also hardships and dangers. Every morning at eight or nine o'clock to go out, come back at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, nibble on bread and other dry food in the wild at noon, and rest in the woods when you are tired, "Some spiders are active at night, and when we went out to collect two nights ago, we encountered poisonous snakes twice. "Chen Jian said that at more than 10 o'clock in the evening, when the headlamp illuminated the snake a few steps away, everyone was shocked, and afterwards it was a silver ring snake." Snakes don't bite deliberately, and we usually take sticks and knock on the grass as we go, scaring it away in advance. I was most afraid that it would appear in a very close place, and some students had been frightened before. ”
In the past month of field expeditions, the four masters and apprentices collected about 5,000 spiders. "When you come back, you need to study further to see if there are any special new species." Chen Jian's Huda team undertook a national special project to investigate the biodiversity of spiders in the Wuling Mountains, and the more specimens collected, the better.
The world of "Spider-Man" is not monotonous
Chen Jian is known as the second generation of "Spider-Man" of Hubei University, and although spider research is very unpopular, "Spider-Man" enjoys themselves. "At the beginning, we were exposed to spider specimens, and if we knew more, we wouldn't be afraid." Zhang Jiachen, a female graduate student, told reporters that at the beginning, she was mainly worried about whether spiders were poisonous. Chen Jian told them during class that some spiders have claws and can pierce into the human body and release toxins, but highly poisonous spiders are rare, and local spiders are generally very toxic, can only hunt insects, and are not harmful to people. Later, she tried to feed the live spiders, plus Chen Jian demonstrated how to catch spiders, so that step by step, the fear of spiders was slowly eliminated. "Some spiders love to attack, and occasionally when their companions are bitten, we joke about becoming Spider-Man."
Climbing mountains, digging holes, some spiders live in the water, and they have to go into the water to catch them. Chen Jian told reporters that there are many ways to collect spiders, the most commonly used is to catch insect webs, pat shrubs, branches, etc., and when the spider falls into the pocket of the web, it will be covered with plastic finger tubes. "Every time we go out, we bring hundreds of finger tubes. Some spiders will fight when put together, and if they don't need to bring them back alive, soak them in alcohol and put them for a hundred years. ”
Chen Jian also carried a sieve with them, and when collecting spiders in the deciduous layer and topsoil, they wore canvas gloves and carried the soil with leaves into the sieve, and the spiders would be sieved into the cloth pocket below, and then spread the cloth pocket on the white cloth for collection. "There are too few people this year, we don't have a sprayer, it's an anti-aircraft gun to hit the spider'." He said that the sprayer is a bit like a gasoline engine, with a long steel pipe, the pesticide atomizes and then sprays out of the steel pipe with smoke, like a single-cylinder motorcycle, the target is some spiders on the canopy of tall trees, wait for them to fall on the white cloth under the tree, and then collect it after an hour. "There are a lot of special insects that can be seen during the collection process, and it's also interesting to observe spiders under the microscope, it's another world." Graduate student Lu Jingsi has been studying with Chen Jian for two years, and he told reporters that when collecting at night, the headlamp shines in the past, and the eyes of some spiders will shine like small stars; the happiest thing is to collect pairs of mature spiders, which can facilitate later research.
The footsteps of spider hunting have traveled all over the country
Tens of thousands of glass bottles contain a wide variety of spider specimens. On August 27, Chen Jian walked through the showcases of the school laboratory, as if "patrolling" in the spider kingdom, which has become a huge spider specimen museum after 40 years of precipitation.
Hubei University is well known throughout the country for its spider research, especially resource surveys and classical taxonomy. "The specimens used for observation in the laboratory cannot fall from the sky. Spider taxonomy requires field visits. "Over the years, Chen Jian has gone out every year, and the footsteps of spider hunting are almost all over the country, and forests, caves, tropical rainforests and other places are good places to find spiders." We generally don't go to big cities, and the places we go to are places with less human activities and a good vegetation environment. In Chen Jian's view, the activities of many spiders are regional and need to be investigated in detail by researchers. The most primitive group of spiders, such as the arthropod spider, is only distributed in East and Southeast Asia, China, Japan and other places, and the Americas, Europe, Australia and Africa are not available. "The abdomen of the spider is not segmented, only the close relatives of the taxon, such as scorpions, have segments, while the back of the abdomen of the knotweed spider has the traces of segmentation, which belong to the original traces." The more he studied deeply, the more interesting he found it to study spiders, and he had to go out every summer and summer, and it was a month when he went.
There are also times when going out in winter. Not long after the Spring Festival in 2012, Chen Jian, together with his colleague Liu Fengxiang and graduate student Quan Dan, rushed to Lushan Mountain, where it was still very cold, and the three people who were shivering with cold were looking for a spider species in the mountain. For several years in a row, they only collected females of the spider in May, not males. "The time for courtship mating must have been before that, and we calculated that it should be March or April." After a few days of cold searching, they finally collected the male spiders that were not yet mature, brought them back to the laboratory to breed and mature, and then obtained the specimens they needed.
Love roller skating, love basketball, love scientific research
Unexpectedly, the 61-year-old Chen Jian is still an athleticist.
4 years ago, Chen Jian searched for teaching videos on the Internet, followed the coach to learn the basic movements of roller skating twice, and practiced in the Sun Plaza of Huda every night, and after 3 months, he not only learned to roller skate, but also skated 5 kilometers away in one breath, often "brushing the street" with college students. "Sports are something I've always loved to do, and when I'm studying, high jump, long jump, sprinting, javelin and so on are my strengths." Not only did he fulfill his childhood skating dream, but he also insisted on playing basketball, shooting 60% of the time. "When we go to the wild mountains, climbing mountains and taking dangerous roads are common things, exercise more, go out for a few more years, and do more research for a few more years." "I prefer to do scientific research than administrative work." Chen Jian was the dean of the School of Life Sciences of Hu University, and during his tenure, the institute was successfully approved as a doctoral program in the first-level discipline of biology. For more than 30 years, he has always adhered to the front line of teaching, and still undertakes more than 100 hours of lecture tasks every year, teaching "Literature Search" for undergraduates, teaching "Arachnoids" and "Introduction to CommonLy Used Software for Data Analysis" for graduate students.
36 years ago, Chen Jian came to Huda University, followed the first generation of "Spider-Man" Professor Zhao Jingzhao, to study the use of spiders for biological control of agricultural and forestry pests, and now he is still sticking to this road, last year he published a paper in a world agronomy journal to evaluate the predatory effect of tea garden spiders on the main pests of tea gardens. Over the years, Chen Jian has trained more than 30 doctors and masters, and there are more "Spider-Man" on this research road. His student Professor Liu Jie has become a representative of the third generation of "Spider-Man" in Huda University, establishing a new genus of athrachnid spiders for the first time and discovering more than 100 new species. "I want to find out how many kinds of spiders there are in the country, but even Hubei is not fully clear until now, and this road is still very long." Chen Jian told reporters that there are more than 40,000 species of spiders reported in the world, and China has recorded more than 5,000 kinds, but according to the new spider species reported every year, conservative estimates are that there are 100,000 species of spiders in the world, and there are more than 10,000 species in China.