Readers’ wildlife photos

We have two batches left (including today’s), so please send in your wildlife photos.

Today’s photos of archnids come from Dean Graetz of Australia, whose IDs and notes are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Backyard Spiders

Here in Canberra, we grow Australian native desert flowers in our backyard for their colour and insect attraction.  As a consequence, we also attract an array of spiders interested in trapping any visiting insects.  We find all spiders naturally interesting.  They have a 200-million-year fossil record and are a very successful lifeform with about 36,000 species, of which about 2,900 are found in Australia.  We wish to share them with you, such as this specimen.  Undoubtedly a female, she is intriguingly patterned and laying out a very sparse web.

A much larger example of these Flower or Crab spiders with legs folded ready to seize any visiting insect.  Her back pattern is very similar to that of the spider in the first image.  The ragged covering of hairs or spines make is difficult to immediately separate the spider body from the flower.

Leaf-curling Spiders  (Phonognatha graeffei) select a suitable leaf from the ground and, using silk, curl it to form a protective cylinder, silked shut at the top and open at the bottom.  They then live in this protective cylinder with only their legs showing, feeling for the vibrations of a captured insect.  As much as we try, we have never seen this construction happening live.

A distinct species of Flower-type spider, away from our backyard, industriously repairing her web after trapping and ingesting the innards of a wasp-type insect.  Its desiccated remains will be eventually cut loose and discarded.

A demanding situation to interpret.  Barely visible at the bottom of the cluster is a bee abdomen.  Swarming all over it are very young spiders that are suspiciously similar to the presiding web-owning female.  We did not witness the bee capture or the arrival of the young spiders.  So, which event came first?  Intriguing!

Another puzzling situation.  An unusually large amount of silk was used to wrap the butterfly, whose abdomen shape suggests its contents have not yet been liquified and extracted.  The view is of the spider’s underside where a curious spherical body is visible.  A parasitic tick?

An unknown species resting at the centre of her unfinished web.  The visible haloes of dots surrounding her are the small sticky deposits she has symmetrically spaced to eventually hold the long cross-lengths of silk, the last task of web construction.  Fascinating and thought-provoking.

The next two photos are borrowed and are not of our backyard, though we do occasionally find this famous spider here.  It is a large female Redback spider, guarding her near-perfect spherical egg sacs.  This species (Latrodectus hasselti) is well known in Australian popular culture.  It is seriously venomous, agonisingly painful, but apparently not lethal since the development of an antivenom.  It is well-known because, in rural settings, people have had their buttocks bitten while using an outdoor toilet (aka Outhouse) and they have never forgotten the occasion.

As well as regarded as serious threats to people, Redbacks are widely recognised as tough and effective predators.  Their silk is outstandingly strong, here trapping a struggling lizard, and their silk plus venom has been photographed killing small snakes.  Being tough and very effective are characteristics Australians respect. Consequently, many sporting teams use the name Redback because of their uniform colour and to imply their toughness and effectiveness.

So it is no surprise that when an Australian boot company wants to promote its tough and effective work boots, it uses the brand name Redback.  These boots are really ‘bloody good’ boots.  I have two pairs.