Taxon sampling
Stasimopus specimens were collected from part of the Great Karoo, South Africa. The area is within the demarcated area for potential shale gas fracking. The boundary of the area is set approximately by the following coordinates: -30.88688, 26.29295 and -33.03079, 20.01661 (Figure 1). Sites were selected by the Karoo BioGaps team to cover the range of environmental conditions present in the region and within each site drainage line habitats were targeted for sampling as they are favoured by trapdoor spiders. Stasimopus specimens were collected at 55 sites. At each site four people spent one-hour, thereby four man-hours soil scraping. Soil scraping involves removing the top layer of soil to expose burrow entrances. Once entrances were exposed, the burrows were excavated using a hand shovel, taking care to not injure the specimens. This methodology was effective for collecting female and juvenile specimens. In order to collect male specimens, road cruising was done after rain in the evenings. This involves slowly driving on isolated roads with torches to find males which are crossing in search of potential mates. All specimens were preserved in a solution of cold alcohol and kept in an ice box. Specimens were later preserved in 80% ethanol in glass polytop vials for long term storage. All locality information is available in Table S1. All newly collected material was deposited in the National Collection of Arachnida (NCA) of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC), Roodeplaat, South Africa.