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Hunting Pokemon: Spider man finds way home amid Shenzhen’s creepy crawlies
- Shenzhen is probably the top example of China’s rapid urbanisation over the past few decades
- But a night tour of a city park showcased the sneaky biodiversity hidden in plain sight
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During the day, Bijiashan Park is a green respite from the concrete jungle that is Shenzhen, but at night, it turns into a fairyland – if you know where to look.
Pink eggs from the golden apple snail glisten like crystals in the evening mist. A cluster of baby spiders and one adult rest under a leaf. A dead spider eaten by fungi grows fuzzy and blossoms like a flower.
Lu Qianle, 26, enjoys nights like this. The Shenzhen-based amateur spider aficionado, known in the nature enthusiasts’ circle as “Frog”, boasts a full beard and wears a tanned shirt and baggy pants. He looked relaxed and calm on a recent nighttime excursion.
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He carries with him a torch, a powerful camera for photographing micro-scenes and several plastic tubes. He regrets that he has no umbrella to catch a snake and show it to me up close.
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“No one but me knows how many kinds of spiders there are in Shenzhen,” he boasts as we begin our journey around the urban nature park.
In total, he has found more than 300 species of spiders in Shenzhen, out of an estimated 500 or 600 species crawling around the city. Lu even discovered a new species, named Anyphaena shenzhen, after the city that is home to over 12.5 million people.
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