Fred Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. A newly discovered trapdoor spider named for Korematsu, a native of the San Francisco area who was a civil rights activist. He was arrested for declining to be incarcerated in the Japanese-American concentration camps.
Newly published research on a new genus of California trapdoor spiders — the work of the Jason Bond laboratory, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology — calls attention to not only the diversity of trapdoor spiders in the state, but a new species they named for national civil rights activist Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu, a San Francisco Bay area native who resisted incarceration in the Japanese-American concentration camps during World War II.
The paper, “Microgeographic Population Structuring in a Genus of California Trapdoor Spiders and Discovery of an Enigmatic New Species (Euctenizidae: Promyrmekiaphila korematsui sp. nov.), appears in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The link: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10983.
“This paper summarizes a herculean effort by our entire lab spanning many years of field, bench, and bioinformatics work and truly reflects an integrative approach that synthesizes genetic, ecological, and morphological data to delineate species,” said Professor Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology; and associate dean, UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
“While it demonstrates, what I think is the new and truly scientific nature of ‘modern’ taxonomy, it also reminds us again, with the description of a new species, just how remarkable the state of California is and that there are always new discoveries waiting just around the corner,” said Bond, the president-elect of the president-elect of the American Arachnological Society. “And, it was particularly poignant to name this spider species for Korematsu. He and his legacy are well known to many residents of Davis.”
Fred Korematsu received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. A newly discovered trapdoor spider named for Korematsu, a native of the San Francisco area who was a civil rights activist. He was arrested for declining to be incarcerated in the Japanese-American concentration camps.
Courtesy photo
The Fred T. Korematsu Elementary School, Davis, bears his name, as do several schools in the Bay Area. Born in Oakland in 1910 to Japanese immigrants, Korematsu resisted President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order and was convicted of evading internment.
A federal court in San Francisco overturned his conviction in 1983, and in 1988, the U.S. officially apologized “for its discriminatory wartime actions and granted reparations to all those who were being interned,” according to Wikipedia. Korematsu received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998 from President Clinton in recognition of his life-long dedication as a civil rights activist. Korematsu died in Marin County in 2005 at age 86.
Co-authors of the paper with Bond are James Starrett, project scientist; Xavier Zahnle, who recently received his doctorate; doctoral candidate Emma Jochim and doctoral student Iris Quayle.
Trapdoor spiders are so named because they construct their burrows with a corklike or wafer trap door made of soil, vegetation and silk.
The research drew funding from a National Science Foundation grant and the Evert and Marion Schlinger Foundation.
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