Alireza Zamani

Alireza Zamani (born 11 January 1994) is an Iranian arachnologist and taxonomist.
Life and career.
Zamani has been interested in spiders since childhood, when he spent most of his time collecting and rearing different species that he could collect from their garden. Influenced by his high school biology teacher, he decided to study Animal Biology at the University of Tehran in order to pursuit his arachnological studies. Zamani has co-recorded over 250 new taxa for the fauna of Iran, and has described several new species, more noticeably "Filistata maguirei" and "Pritha garfieldi" of the spider family Filistatidae, named after the former Spider-Man actors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, and "Lycosa aragogi" of the family Lycosidae, named after Aragog, the fictional spider from Harry Potter franchise. He has appeared on several TV and radio programs, including a guest appearance in the third season of the popular Iranian TV program, "Khandevane", where he introduced a new species of Huntsman spiders, which was to be named after the show's host, Rambod Javan. Zamani has authored "The Field Guide of Spiders and Scorpions of Iran", which is the first field guide devoted to the arachnids of the Middle East, containing information on more than 230 species of both orders. He is the senior author of the catalog of Iranian spiders, and is the country coordinator of Iran in the World Spider Catalog project. Zamani is a partner at the "Virtual Institute of Spider Taxonomy Research", and a member of the editorial boards of the journals "Arachnida: Rivista Aracnologica Italiana" and "Check List".