Category: spiders

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 7, 2025 • 8:35 am

Today our regular Mark Sturtevant weighs in with some spider photos. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Here are some spider photos. Most were taken early last season—I’m usually about a year behind—but a couple are more recent, shot specifically to fill in a narrative gap for this post.

It is an odd thing that I tend to neglect photographing some of the most commonplace arthropods, and probably the most overlooked of these had been what we call house spiders. These shy cobweb weavers always hide from the slightest disturbance, but after much, much effort I managed to get a focus stack of this one in a staged setting. This is the Triangulate Cobweb Spider, Steatoda triangulosa, and you have probably seen thousands of them.

Next up is a species of Ground Spider, I think Drassyllus sp. Ground spiders are free-roaming and are among the fastest spiders I know when they decide to make a run for it:

The spider shown in the next photo is a Running Crab Spider (Philodromus sp). The term “crab spider” is widely used for spiders in different families, so this is not particularly related to the crab spiders that you might see lurking on flowers:

Here is a small Wolf Spider (Trochosa idunno). She was quite thirsty, so it was easy to get this focus stack of her while she was having a drink.

With the previous picture and subsequent pictures, you can see a significant change in my gear through the reflections in spider eyes. I had used a very popular brand of dual head flash for years, but one that produced twin reflections. Last season I switched to a more traditional single head flash, and you can see that in the reflections of things like spider eyes. I’ve always rolled my own flash diffusers, and this is one of those big conical ones that people tend to favor for single flashes. The black intrusion on the bottom in the eye reflections is the camera lens. One element in this early edition of the new diffuser is the bright spot that you can see in the reflected diffuser face. This of course comes directly from the flash head, and it is an exceedingly common artifact in these types of diffusers. However, I managed to make that pretty much go away with later refinements on the design, and you will see that here and there in later pictures.

Next up are jumping spiders. I begin with my personal favorite which is the Tan Jumping Spider Platycryptus undatus. These are the largest species in this family in my area, and I am very lucky that I can go out to my shed and almost always find at least one of these spiders on it. They have a flatter shape than other jumping spiders, and this allows them to quickly hide in cracks. The cryptic coloration of this species would make it nearly impossible to spot on tree bark, but these seem to prefer the shed (as far as I know). Jumping spiders are fun to work with since they have so much personality and even curiosity, but they also can hop away and go scurrying across the dining room table in an instant. The first pictures show a male:

 

In spider-world, males are often more colorful than the females, and this is a product of intersexual selection where males actively court sharp-eyed and judgmental females. Normally, male color displays are to attract a female and to persuade her into mating. But in the world of jumping spiders male color may also be used as a defense against a murderous attack from a female. Jumping spiders have good but also very weird vision, in which red objects appear closer than they really are. It has not escaped notice that the males of many jumping spider species have reddish markings on their face, like this one, and there is speculation that this might cause a hungry female to lunge inaccurately.

The next two pictures are of a female Platycryptus. I always think of them as looking a bit like scary little Ewoks from Star Wars. Unlike the male, who was super chill for pictures, she needed a meal to sit still for her manually focus stacked pictures:

I would like to explain focus stacking. Macro photography tends to produce pictures with a very shallow depth of focus. One solution for this is to take a series of shots at slightly different focal points, while striving to keep the same alignment on the subject. The pictures are combined, and software is used to blend the pictures together to produce greater depth of focus in a single picture. The process can also result in certain artifacts, however, and those are later cleaned up to some degree with digital trickery. The whole process is technically very easy, but it can take time.

The final images are manual focus stacks of Bold Jumping Spiders, Phidippus audax. The first one is a juvenile, and the last two are of a very regal adult male, all decked out to advertise the quality of his genes to females. Those largish chelicerae and fangs may look imposing, but males of all spiders are strictly lovers and not fighters: those things are simply part of his “bling” for the ladies. Their only thought is to meet up with a conspecific spider of the opposite sex and to hopefully not be murdered:

Spot the spider!

May 16, 2025 • 8:15 am

We have only one set of Readers’ Wildlife left, so I’m putting in a “Spot the. .  .” feature from Neil Taylor of Cambridge in the UK.  But please send in your photos, folks.

Neil says this:

The first photo is a tree stump draped in spider webs in which a spider is hiding. . . .I’m not a spider expert but I think it is a running crab spider (Philodromus sp.).  Quite a beautiful little thing.

Can you spot it? I’ll post the reveal at 11 a.m. Chicago time. I think this is of medium difficulty. Please do not reveal in the comments where it is; let others have the fun of finding it.

Readers’ wildlife photos

April 11, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today Mark Sturtevant has returned with pictures of diverse critters, including insects, amphibians, and gastropods. Mark’s IDs, links, and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of various critters in my area, which is in eastern Michigan.

The first picture is a young treefrog, and it is about as big as your thumbnail. This will be one of two sister species in the area, either Cope’s Gray Treefrog, Dryophytes chrysoscelis, or the Gray Treefrog, D. versicolor. They are commonly green in green surroundings. If it is the latter species, then it is tetraploid and that is why it is a separate species from the former. Polyploidy is one way to quickly form a new species, and this is a classic example.

Next up are a couple of our local snails, the Brown-lipped snails, Cepaea nemoralis. I was not sure what to do with them, and so I did this. These snails were introduced from Europe, and are now widespread in the U.S.

The next several pictures are manual focus stacks that were staged on the ‘ol dining room table. First up is a young Flower Crab Spider. That name applies to many species of crab spiders that often lurk on flowers to capture prey. Based on its eye arrangement and prominent hairs, I am pretty sure this one is Mecaphasa sp.

The jumping spiders that follow are species that I’ve shown here many times. The first is a Dimorphic Jumping Spider, Maevia inclemens. This one was very fidgety and it needed something to eat to help settle down. The lights in the eyes of the first picture came from an LED modeling light to help me to focus. I liked the look and so I did not remove the highlighting in post-processing. In the second picture you can see reflections of my fingertips in the large frontal eyes.

Another common spider is the Bold Jumping Spider, Phidippus audax. This youngster was very easy to work with.

The weird creature shown in the next picture is one of our Harvestmen, I think Phalangium opilio. I don’t see this species very often even though it’s distributed all around me. I like them because males have really long pedipalps and horned chelicerae. In some populations, the chelicerae horns are much longer than what is seen here.

Next is a moth that flew inside the house one evening. I think it’s a new species for me – the Lunate Zale Moth, Zale lunata.

And finally, I spotted this large caterpillar one day when out with the cameras. This is a mature Polyphemus Moth larva, Antheraea polyphemus, and it will become maybe the 2nd or 3rd largest moth in the U.S. For the portrait picture, I was trying to get it to look all haughty and Offended, as caterpillars like this often look very offended when being handled. But instead, this one looked like it was Eevil and plotting something, Mwa ha ha haa.

Readers’ wildlife photos

February 28, 2025 • 8:15 am

Regular Mark Sturtevant has sent us a passel of insect and spider photos. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his pictures by clicking on them.

I come with another set of pictures of arthropods. Mostly orb-weaver spiders, actually. The pictures were taken in various parks near where I live, which is in Michigan.

Let’s begin with the large bee shown in the first two pictures. I was rather puzzled about the identity of this bee. Although it resembles a bumble bee, it turns out to be a male Eastern Carpenter Bee, Xylocopa virginica. I don’t recall ever seeing a male foraging at flowers, but I do see them hovering around nest entrances. The females are commonly seen out foraging, and are easily recognized by their shiny black abdomen and large all-black head. Female carpenter bees are well known for boring large holes into soft wood, which they provision with pollen for their young in a series of stacked cells. In preparing for this post, I learned that these bees are often not solitary (I thought they were!), but instead the can form small social groups where their duties depend on their age which can be up to three years. Older females are dominant and they perform all duties and most of the egg laying. Younger females do less provisioning and egg laying while tending to guard the nest entrance, and the youngest females pretty much just eat provisions and provide no services. Although I carry multiple degrees in Entomology (it’s a long story), this hobby and posting in WEIT has taught me a lot about the lives of insects.

Now we move on to orb-weaver spiders. There are many species in my area, and many members of this group stay hidden near their web by day. Some of them are cussedly hard to tell apart, but I do believe the first one is a Shamrock Orbweaver, Araneus trifolium. There are two other very similar species, but I rely on differences in the leg banding and markings under the abdomen to suggest this ID.

Next up is a Furrow Orbweaver, Larinioides cornutus. These common spiders are specialists in concealment since by day they usually stay in a tightly woven hide-away in a curled leaf.

The next two pictures are of Spotted Orbweavers, Neoscona crucifera. The first one really really impressed me since it managed to catch a large cicada.

The large and colorful garden spiders, or Argiopes, are always a favorite. These will sit out in the center of their web during the day. Although the other orb-weavers may be found anywhere, the Argiopes seem more patchy in distribution now-a-days, with only certain areas where they are common. The species shown here is the Banded Garden Spider, Argiope trifasciata.

Moving away from spiders, the next picture shows a Great Spreadwing Damselfly, Archilestes grandis, which is the largest damselfly in the U.S. That is not to say that it’s a large insect, but it is the size of a smallish dragonfly and so it is way bigger than all other damsels in the U.S. The linked picture will show you. This is originally a species from the southern portion of the country, but it has moved farther north and they are now common in a certain park near Ann Arbor. I go to this park every year or two with the specific goal of photographing this insect and of course whatever else may show up.

Bringing up the rear are pictures of grasshoppers. First is a mating pair of Differential Grasshoppers (Melanoplus differentialis). It was a little surprising that they could be coaxed onto my finger for this picture.

Some time ago I came across an internet meme that pointed out an amusing pareidolia with a grasshopper, which was that its sternum bore what looks like a lion face with sunglasses. I recognized that the species was a member of the spur-throated subfamily, Melanoplinae (See? My entomology degrees are useful), and the Differential ‘hopper and many other local species belong in it. So the last picture is of two spur-throated grasshoppers, and they each have the feline pattern. The one on the left is the Differential Grasshopper, and the right one is a Red-legged Grasshopper (M. femurrubrum). I expect that Jerry will especially like this last bit! [JAC: Cat faces!]

In closing, on occasion I am asked about the equipment that I use for photography. That really does not matter, although these pictures were generally taken with an old and very worn Canon crop sensor body (t5i), which is cheap these days, and a nice macro lens (Canon 100mm, f/2.8L), but there are less expensive macro lenses that are just as good or even better. If anyone would like to try this form of photography, however, I would suggest that they look into OM system cameras. OM cameras (formerly Olympus) have features that make them especially effective at macrophotography, and if I had a way to do it all over again I would not think twice about switching to that brand. Also, for what you get I believe they tend to be cheaper than other camera models. But it is hard to go wrong with cameras, and you can easily modify a regular lens to be used as a macro lens. What really matters, more than the choice of camera, is the diffuser on the external flash. That is a whole other subject that can take a lot of discussion. I lie awake at night worrying about whether my diffuser could be better.

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 17, 2024 • 8:15 am

Send in your photos, folks!

Today we have some arthropod photos from regular Mark Sturtevant, whose IDs and captions are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Hello again from Eastern Michigan. Here are various insects and spiders that I had photographed in my area from two summers ago. My last post left us at a very productive park near where I work, and this post starts with some things that I’d found during that same outing.

We start with a boldly marked Stink Bug called the Anchor Stink Bug (Stiretrus anchorago).

The field in this park always has numerous Chinese Mantids (Tenodera sinensis). This being early August, they had not yet reached adult-hood so here is a nymph. By early fall I can expect to see many huge adults in the field. It seems guaranteed. I suspect that some years ago, someone had set out many of their oothecae (egg pods), and this thriving population remains the result.

Overlooking the field was a hardwood forest, and I was quite pleased that many interesting kinds of critters were in it. Among these were weird planthoppers from the family Derbidae, which are one of the many good things found under tree leaves. These lack common names, so I gave them my own. First, here is what I call the Flat Derbid (Anotia uhleri) because when fully at rest they spread their wings out flat, making them resemble a small translucent moth. This one was slightly disturbed by my attentions so it had gone into a more alert posture. Although Derbids can jump and fly like other planthoppers, they are rather placid in nature so they are easy to photograph when handled with care. The prominent thingies on the head are its antennae:

The next one is what I call the Red Derbid (Apache degeeri). This is my favorite Derbid, and I found several of these that day. Its antennae are long and squiggly, making it look like it has some kind of weird face. There is a third species that I call the White Derbid. It is nearly the twin of the Red Derbid, but it’s mostly white. These are found under tree leaves that are farther to the south:

The woods were full of orb webs, and most of those belonged to an odd but quite common spider called the Spined Micrathena (Micrathena gracilis). These pea-sized spiders are pretty helpless when displaced outside of their web, but they are quite skillful when in their web and of course they swiftly build their large orb webs at night when they are basically blind:

Among these spiny weirdos I was amazed to find a striking color variant, as shown in the next picture. I had to take this one home for staged pictures! That is one spider that belongs on a heavy metal music album cover!:

The remaining pictures came from other area parks. As I am still feeling spidery after that last one, here is our largest spider, the Fishing Spider (Dolomedes scriptus). The linked picture gives you an idea of their size. Fishing Spiders hunt near and on water, and this one was found along a river bank. This lady had carried her egg sac to the top of a plant, and she is guarding her recently hatched spiderlings in a web nursery. You can see the mass of babies in the background. Fishing Spiders can be irritable at this time, but she was not at all aggressive so I had no trouble taking a wide-angle macro picture. Although the composition does not suggest it, the lens had to pretty much touch the spider since the working distance for wide-angle macro is extremely short:

I have some odds-and-ends remaining, but I will finish with an interesting one.

Next up is an Ailanthus Webworm Moth (Atteva aurea). These small moths have expanded their range northward since they have accepted the invasive Ailanthus or Tree of Heaven as a host plant. If one plays with the lighting, as I have done here, one can get a bit of iridescent blue out of the black markings on the wings:

Next up is a Scaly Bee Fly (Lepidophora lepidocera). Adult Bee Flies feed on nectar, and the larvae are either parasitic or predatory on other insects, depending on the species:

Here are some of our local wasps. First is our native Northern Paper Wasp, Polistes fuscatus, followed by an Eastern Yellowjacket, Vespula maculifrons. These are of course social wasps:

Next up is a White-banded Potter Wasp, Ancistrocerus albophaleratus. Potter wasps are solitary, and they build a mud-pot nest which they will provision with paralyzed arthropods like caterpillars or spiders, depending on the species:

The above wasps all belong to the family Vespidae, which can be immediately recognized because their front wings are folded lengthwise into a V in cross-section (V is for Vespidae).

The next insect looks like a lovely green-eyed bee, but I soon realized it lacked certain bee characters and so it had to be a wasp. It took a while, but I finally identified it as belonging to the family Crabronidae, and the genus Tachytes – that is all I know. These solitary wasps raise their young in burrows, provisioning them with paralyzed grasshoppers or katydids:

The last insect is rather comical and I don’t understand what it wants. This is a Pixie Robber Fly (Beameromyia sp.). Robber Flies are of course predatory. I occasionally see this species drawn to the porch light at night, as this one was, and for some reason they really want to stand on their head. I managed to coax this one onto a stick for pictures, and while I would tip and turn the stick to get it into frame, it would immediately adjust its stance so that it remained as you see it here. I have no idea why:

Readers’ wildlife photos

November 21, 2024 • 8:15 am

Regular contributor Mark Sturtevant has once again sent us a batch of lovely insect photos, including some arachnids and one mammal). Mark’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The first part of this set are photographs from the gardens around my house, and then we move out to area parks. I live in eastern Michigan.

The lovely beetle shown in the first picture is a Lily Leaf Beetle (Lilioceris lilii). These become common on the lilies that the wife likes to grow, and they are a minor pest on them as they riddle the plants with holes. I had never seen the larvae, but while preparing this post I had learned that they hide under the leaves and I simply never looked there. The larvae are disgusting, as they cover themselves with their droppings as a deterrent. I should definitely photograph some next season!:

Next up is another example of Say’s Mantidfly (Dicromantispa sayi). In my last post I had shown a female, and this is a smaller male. This species of Mantidfly grows up by living and feeding inside the egg sacs of spiders, and there are always jumping spiders on our shed and that is where I find Mantidflies:

Back in the garden there is always drama of one kind or another. I was very elated one day to find a Cuckoo wasp foraging at the daisies, as shown in the next picture. I won’t be able to identify the species without careful inspection, but these beautiful wasps are usually challenging to photograph since they are normally very alert and active. I simply got lucky here. Cuckoo wasps are so-named because they are kleptoparasites in the nests of wasps or bees. Besides feeding on the provisions meant for the larvae of their hosts, they also eat the host eggs or larvae as well:

Predators commonly stay among the daisies in the garden, including the crab spiders shown in the next two pictures. I believe these are Misumenoides formosipes, based on the ridge that I could see just underneath the frontal eyes. The second picture shows one that has taken a Green Bottle Fly, Lucilia sericata:

Next are pictures taken from local parks. Here is one of our larger species of skipper butterfly, the Indigo Duskywing, Erynnis baptisiae. One can generally recognize skippers since they are usually moth-like butterflies, and they have distinctly hooked-shaped clubs on their antennae. In my younger years it was believed that skippers were a separate group from butterflies, but now they are found to be within the latter. And while we are at it, butterflies are now understood to be descended from moths, but let’s move on:

The remaining pictures were all taken on one day at a flower-filled and very productive meadow near where I work. There are more pictures from that park from this day, but those will have to wait for later.

First up is this extremely metallic Dogbane Beetle (Chrysochus auratus). These are vegetarian on a narrow range of host plants, including Dogbane, which makes the insects toxic:

The beetle shown in the next picture had me stumped for a while, but the distinctly “flabellate” antennae and an old field guide helped me to narrow it down. This is a kind of Wedge-shaped beetle, Macrosiagon limbata, and that surprised me since it does not resemble the one species that I know from this obscure family. This one is a male, identified by its antennae. Females will lay eggs on flowers, and the active larvae that hatch will clamber onto a passing bee to be taken back to the nest. There they will consume the larvae in the nest:

Many Bergamot flowers were in the field, and they were well tended by many of these clear-winged sphinx moths (Hemaris sp), and you can see tthat it is a bumble bee mimic:

The final insect-related pictures show why I spend much time carefully looking under leaves. I will likely never learn the species names of these insects, however. The white mass on the right is a bundle of cocoons from the Braconidae family of wasps, which are small wasps that are parasitoids inside the bodies of caterpillars. The term “parasitoid” is preferred here, rather than parasite, since the insects live inside the bodies of their hosts – parasite-like – but they quite deliberately and slowly kill their host, while parasites aren’t supposed to do that on purpose. The eviscerated caterpillar has fallen away, unfortunately, but while it was there it would be laying across the cocoons, still barely alive for a time, and actively “protecting” the cocoons in a strange example of how a hosts’ behavior is changed by parasitoid wasps. I have seen this many times, and you can see it as well in this very entertaining Ze Frank video that Jerry posted recently.

But that isn’t all. What are those black thingies to the left? Well, those are the pupae of a kind of hyperparasitic wasp – very small wasps that are parasitoids of the parasitoids. I had seen these mini-tombstones of pupae many times on plants, but this is the first time that I had enough context to understand the bigger picture about them. If you look carefully you will see an adult wasp among the pupae – a detail that I did not see at the time. Based on some findings in BugGuide, I suggest that this second group is from the Eulophidae family, as shown in the linked picture:

Next is a close-up of the Eulophid pupae. This required the Raynox 250 diopter lens to boost the power of the macro lens. The yellow stuff next to the pupae is called meconium, and they are the gut contents of the hyperparasitoid larvae. When a larva pupates, it will first purge its gut contents:

When I excitedly showed this amazing story to the wife, she was quite horrified.

After a pleasant and very productive afternoon spent in the flower-filled meadow, I noticed that I was being watched by a curious onlooker: