Icius Tukarami and slain policeman Tukaram Omble.
In July last year, 34-year-old reptile photographer Somnath Kumbhar saw a spider with a black body, just over 3 mm long, and lighter legs sitting on a leaf of the jasmine plant on the windowsill of his home in Maharasthra’s Thane district. Kumbhar, who had been shooting spiders for over eight years, immediately noticed that this insect looked different from the ones he had previously seen.
He reached out to his friend, naturalist Dhruv Prajapati, who is a research fellow at an environment research institution in Gujarat. Prajapti is working on his PhD dissertation on the spiders of South Gujarat. Prajapati noted that he was unable to identity the spider species from the photos he had been sent, so asked Kumbhar to collect a speciment.