Alireza Zamani is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Turku in Finland. He talks to me about his paper published in ZooKeys on August 3 in which he and his coauthor describe a new genus and ten new species of spiders from Iran! We talk about his “habit” of describing new species, why so many undescribed species sit on museum shelves for decades before they’re described, how to assemble a species list for an entire country, a new species named because of this podcast (!!), and a species named after the father of modern medicine!

The title of the paper is “A new genus and ten new species of spiders (Arachnida, Araneae) from Iran.” The paper is currently available open access in ZooKeys: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/70408/

To learn more about Alireza Zamani, follow him on Twitter (@PersonSpiders), Instagram (alireza.zamani.spider), or visit his website: http://alireza-zamani.com/

Be sure to follow New Species on Twitter (@PodcastSpecies), like the podcast page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/NewSpeciesPodcast), and music in this podcast is "No More (Instrumental)," by HaTom (https://fanlink.to/HaTom).

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