Category: arthropods

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 5, 2018 • 7:45 am

Reader Mark Sturtevant sent some insect and spider photos a while back, and I just found them. His notes are indented.

The first picture is of ants (I am thinking Formica sp.), tending their colony of poplar aphids (Chaitophorus populicola). It is very common to see poplar saplings growing near water, and there one can usually find colonies of these aphids – always closely guarded by ants who will drink the honeydew that they secrete.

Next is a simple but handsome click beetle which looks to be Ampedus nigricollis.

The pictures that follow are what I call “Love Story, with Jumping Spiders”. Those of a certain age will know the name reference. When out with the camera one day, I chanced upon a nice female jumping spider (Phidippus clarus) feeding on a caterpillar. But she had an ardent admirer who wanted to risk everything to be with her, despite the dangers. The following pictures tell their story which does not end well, but it could have been worse.

“Mmmmm, caterpillar. I have all that I need”.

“What is that?”

“He keeps waving”.

“Go away!”

“Why doesn’t she wave back?”

In jumping spider world, not waving back is not a good sign. The male crept forward, waving to the female. When he got close she pounced at him, but had she not had her fangs full she might have murdered him. Rebuffed, he slunk away but soon caught a grasshopper.

*Sigh * “Guess its grasshopper tonight. And loneliness”.

The next two pictures are of Calochromus perfacetus, one of the species of net-winged beetles that are regularly seen in my favorite field.

Finally, we have… we have… an inordinate fondness for weevils. I caught a lucky break in identifying this species since there are so many weevils that look like this. But the Bug Guide web sight can be searched for specific details, and a search there for ‘weevil, thistle’ produced a good candidate, Larinus planus, and its preferred host the Canadian thistle (Cirsium arvense).

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 26, 2018 • 8:00 am

Tony Eales from Australia (it’s Australia Day) sent some nice pictures of spiders, including a weird scorpion-tailed spider and a bird-dropping mimic. Tony’s notes are indented.

I’ve been having a lot of luck finding some oddball spiders lately. My favourites are members of the newly separate Arkyidae family (formerly in with the orb weavers Araneidae). Within a week over Xmas, my number of species photographed went from 0 to 4. I found Arkys bulburiensis, A. cornutus, A. lancearius, and A. speechleyi.

A. bulburiensis:

A. cornutus:

A. lancearius:

A. speechleyi:

Another real oddball I’ve been searching for ages and I finally located after Xmas is Arachnura higginsi, the Scorpion-tailed Spider. This orb-weaver is usually sitting in the middle of its web stretched straight out like a baseball bat at the end of a string of long egg sacs. When disturbed it can curl its ‘tail’ up and looks rather scorpion-like. I have no clue what this extraordinary feature is for.

Almost as strange is one I found in amongst my hanging plants. The False Bird-dropping Spider Celaenia calotoides. They hang under a string of papery ball-like egg sacs. You can see one in the photo. Unfortunately I think these have been parasitised by a Spider Fly larvae Ogcodes sp. that I’ve seen around the house recently. You can see the hole in the egg sac in the photo and there are discarded pupae cases in the web.

Here’s a photo from Arachne.org.au showing its resemblance to a bird dropping:

Photo: Adam Parsons, Hill Top NSW 2575

The putative parasite, Ogcodes sp.:

You won’t believe this weird spider!

January 22, 2018 • 1:30 pm

LOL! I used a clickbait headline again! But you really should pay attention to this bizarre arachnid: the pelican spider (also called the “assassin” spider). Note the eyes at the top, the bizarrely formed cephalothorax, and the very long chelicerae (jaws):

Photo: Hannah Wood

The specimen above, pictured in an article at the Mother Nature Network (MNN) appears to have had its legs removed, but here’s an intact one:

Sourse: Synapse

Why do they look like this? MNN explains:

Pelican spiders were introduced to science in 1854, when one of the bizarre-looking creatures was found preserved in 50 million-year-old amber. With a long neck-like structure and mouthparts protruding like an angled “beak,” the comparisons to a pelican were probably inevitable. Scientists initially thought pelican spiders were extinct, but then live specimens were found a few decades later — and that’s when the purpose behind their pelican-esque appearance became clear.

Pelican spiders, aka assassin spiders, evolved to look like this for good reason: They eat other spiders, and need a way to subdue their potentially dangerous prey from a safe distance. They’re active hunters, skulking through the night in search of silk draglines created by other spiders. When they find one, they follow the silk to its source, sometimes plucking on the spider’s web to trick it into coming closer. And once the unsuspecting prey is within range, a pelican spider will impale it with her long, fang-tipped “jaws” (actually appendages called chelicerae), as the Smithsonian Institution explains. She then uses her chelicerae to hold the prey away from her body, keeping herself safe from potential counterattacks until the captured spider dies (see photo below).

Spider at work:

Photo: Nikolai Scharff

These spiders are especially abundant in Madagascar, but are also found in Australasia and southern Africa. There’s a new paper reviewing the Madagascar group (see below, free access), but it’s nearly 100 pages long, full of morphological detail useful for taxonomy but not for us, and I haven’t read it. If you’re an arachnophile, have a go.

I couldn’t find a video of these things preying on other spiders, but this YouTube video gives a longer explanation and an animation of how they catch other spiders:

h/t: Su
_________

Wood, H. M. and N. Scharff. 2018. A review of the Madagascaran pelican spiders of the genus Eriauchenius O. Pickard-Cambridge, 1881, and Madagascarahaea gen. n. (Araneaa, Archaeidae). ZooKeys 727:1096.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 13, 2018 • 7:45 am

Today we have a grab-bag of photos by Aussie Tony Eales, whose notes are indented.

Here’s a grab bag of odds and ends to keep the tank topped-up The first is a close-up of a Blowfly—I think from the family Calliphoridae. It’s interesting that there appear to be two distinctive types of compound eyes, the upper rows and the lower rows.

The next is a cute little Cymbacha ocellata Crab Spider (family Thomisidae) building its bell-shaped retreat from a fresh green leaf.

The next is one of my favourite terrestrial orchids, Dipodium variegatum. They have no leaves and are visible only when they put up their flower spikes.

Next is a new spider for me that I saw for the first time only yesterday: Euryopis superba. They are very small (~8mm) and live under eucalyptus bark.

Last, a lacewing larva carrying a pile of parts from its former victims as camouflage. [JAC: This is a new on one me!]

 

Readers’ wildlife photographs

December 12, 2017 • 7:45 am

The readers came through with more photos for me, so please hold off with further photo contributions until after New Year when I return. Today’s arthropod photo odyssey comes from reader Mark Sturtevant, whose words are indented.

The first two pictures are of one of the large jumping spiders that I can generally pick up from my shed. This is the tan jumper, Platycryptus undatus. The name refers to the flattened shape which allows it to hide under things. These spiders are fairly mellow for a Salticid, and so are pretty easy to catch and work with.


 

The next two pictures are of another common jumping spider with a decidedly different personality. This is of course the bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax), a species that is pretty familiar to anyone in the U.S. This handsome male was living in a watering can on our front porch, and it would always dash into the spout when I would try to retrieve it for pictures. As is typical of its kind, it was not in the least interested in sitting still, but the ‘ol give-them-a-fly trick works every time.

Temporarily moving on to a different spider family, we see in the next picture a rather warty looking crab spider. This looks to be in the genus Xysticus, according to overall appearance, proportions of the legs, and various features of the carapace and front legs that are shown and described in the amazing web site known as BugGuide.

More jumping spiders are in the next two pictures. This lovely but very small species is Tutelina elegans. I had seen a couple of these in the early summer in my #2 favorite park. This is a female, and I’m on the lookout for a male which is shown in the link.

 

The next two pictures are of luna moth caterpillars (Actias luna). The story behind this is that we have a local ‘nature’ store that sometimes has batches of caterpillars of various kinds for the kiddies (and for me, of course). It’s from here that I got my start raising Saturniids. Last summer they had a large batch of young luna moth caterpillars, and so I bought some. This species is very easy to raise, but these were being fed on hickory leaves which is not a tree that I have used before. So I scouted around and found a nice neighbor with a hickory tree and she let me drop by regularly to gather fresh leaves for my brood. In these pictures I was trying to record the fact that these juicy little (well, not so little) gummy worms are fairly translucent. When slightly backlit with the sun one can see their slowly pulsing gut. I don’t think I succeeded showing that here, but the colors are still pretty striking.

The larvae made their cocoons at about mid-summer, but unfortunately they all eclosed to adults while I was dragged away on a vacation. They were then in the care of a friend, but when I returned, the moths, which do not feed, had all eclosed and were either too old or too dead to photograph. I will have to try again some other time, as I’ve never photographed the adults of this species. 

Finally, I add a weird Hemipteran which is a long-necked seed bug (Myodocha annulicornis). These insects are common pests on strawberries.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 28, 2017 • 7:30 am

Let me put out another call for wildlife photos, as the tank is getting too low for my liking (I still have a backlog, so if your pix haven’t yet appeared, no worries.)

Tony Eales in Oz has sent us a batch of small but lovely arthropods. His comments and IDs are indented. The last photo is a mystery to him (and me), so readers are welcome to ID it.

The weather is warming up here down under and the creepy crawlies are coming out. I thought I’d send a collection of the more out of the ordinary beasties I’ve photographed. The first one is a Diplura—one of the non-insect hexapod orders. This one is in the Japygidea family and at first I thought it was some sort of unpigmented earwig. Convergent evolution makes things confusing.

Next an actual earwig (Order Dermaptera), no idea about the family. This one was tiny, around 6mm, found in leaf litter.

The next is a Poduromorpha, one of the three main groups of springtails and definitely the cutest: only about a millimetre.

Next is a juvenile springtail of the common sort I find in the group Entomobryomorpha.

And I finally found a Symphypleona springtail, the last of the three main groups of springtails. These are really tiny, around or less than a millimetre.

Then something I initially identified as a juvenile centipede but found out is in fact a completely different Class, a Symphyla or “garden centipede”, not closely related to centipedes at all but still within the Myriapod subphylum.

Just the other day I found within a rotting log in a rainforest a Beaky Millipede Siphonophorida. At first I thought it might be a Velvet Worm, which is my dream to photograph, but it’s still a strange and obscure order of the larger millipede class.

Another little observed but common order of millipedes is the tiny Polyxenida or pincushion millipedes. There’s one suburban location where I regularly get hundreds in my leaf litter samples. They’re at most about 3mm long and surprisingly fast.

Lastly is something that turned up in the leaf litter and I just don’t know what it is. Ideas?

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 8, 2017 • 8:00 am

I still have a decent backlog of photos, but not big enough to keep me from being a bit nervous. Please send in (or continue to send in) your good wildlife photos, and that includes plants and landscapes. Today’s batch comes from reader Tony Eales in Australia; his comments are indented.

Spiders!

Mum and the kids. Cryptachaea cf. veruculata is a Tangle-Web or Comb-Footed Spider in the family Theridiidae. They’re quite common and I often find them near the base of large trees.

The Helpis minitabunda is a type of jumping spider I’ve been longing to find for a while. I was very lucky to find a fully coloured up male as the females and juveniles have a dull cryptic grey colour. Unlucky for this guy he has been reduced to a hexapod in some past battles.

JAC: I found a YouTube video of this species, clearly not a colored-up male:

I’ve sent pictures of the ant mimicking jumping spider Myrmarachne luctuosa before but this is my best shot yet and it is hands down my favourite common spider.

Very happy with this shot of a Round Ant Eater, Omoedus orbiculatus, with Iridomyrmex purpureus prey and a Freeloader fly (family Chloropidae) joining in on the meal and swollen with juice.

Lastly a beautiful Zodariidae, known as Ant Spiders.  This one, Subasteron daviesae, is fairly large and easy to find compare with a lot of others in this family who hunt trough the leaf litter and grass.