oh, the shame. episode 26, the half-yearly anniversary of the weekly spider feature, is a week late. all i can say is, i'm on vacation, but as you will see, i haven't actually been neglecting the eight-leggers. only the celebritizing them online. so here are a selection of the fearsome beasts i've encountered in northern minnesota in the last two weeks. a little light on the info this week, too, i'm afraid, but a picture is worth... you know.
since we're heading out tomorrow on a four-week trip to the states, i'll feature a nice big spider today - just in case i can't keep up with the regular weekly dose of arachnids while we're away. this is the 'avondale' spider (in new zealand; or 'flat huntsman' in australia, where it's native), Delena cancerides. believed to have arrived in new zealand in the mid-1920s after hitching a ride over in railroad sleepers, it became established in avondale (and became a local icon) but has not spread much further.
avondales are interesting for several reasons, other than their impressive size (full legspan to 15+ cm). they're among the 1% of spiders that live in groups, perhaps because their preferred daytime habitat (under dry bark) is limited. they don't build webs, but hunt nocturnally. they were featured in the film arachnophobia (though i'm not sure how enjoyable it was for them) - interestingly, the ones that starred were from new zealand, since they're protected in australia and couldn't be exported. i believe i also heard that due to strict biosecurity regulations, those spiders (once exported) weren't allowed back in, and so were cared for in a kind of spider retirement colony once their acting careers were over.
once again i have to pilfer photos from the interweb this week, having never come across a live avondale myself. (someday, i hope!) the one above is from wikipedia, (c) b. macquillan. some more nice pics can be seen here (especially this one - with bonus spiderlings!), here, and also here. sweet dreams. >:)
Eriophora pustulosa isn't particularly exotic, fierce or colorful. i've mentioned it here a few times, having had one living in my kitchen, tracked a cryptic one down on a tree, and observed one dining in mid-air. but it's a nice chunky spider (with a great latin name), large enough to get a decent look at with the naked eye and common enough to be a familiar friend. this one in particular was spinning an ill-fated web between the recycling bin and a tree.
but ?she was easier to see once gently relocated to the slightly brighter background of the bin lid.
last weekend, we went to wellington, planning to catch up with some good people and finally visit kapiti island, a long-time goal. the people part went great; the predator-free sanctuary island park, not so much. high seas, sleet and hail caused the ferry operators to (probably sensibly) cancel all crossings for sunday, the day for which we had booked our permit. 2009 doesn't seem to be a good year for our vacation plans, what with great barrier reef falling through over easter, so here's hoping our sojourn to the US in two weeks is a little less star-crossed.
well, as we were driving around upper (the) hutt visiting people, we came across these two shaggy bundles of equine ridiculousness. they were basically hooved teddy bears. and their tiny ears, velvety nuzzling noses and warm pony breath definitely helped to ease the disappointment a little. miniature horses are often evil-tempered (small dog/napoleon syndrome, i guess), but these guys were lapping up the attention, and we were happy to give it to them.
this week we return to the fairytale kingdom of spiders under the SEM. our subject is Badumna longinqua, the grey (or brown or black) house spider - in fact, the same one who lived in the kitchen in our old flat, featured in this older post. we encourage them when we find them living in our house (and even took one with us when we moved house), since they cheerily reduce biting bug numbers and are also fun to feed and easy to observe. right now we know of one nice specimen cozied up under the kitchen sink and another few around the window frames.
the hapless white-tails we come across (Lampona sp.) are usually moved outside, dispatched and/or retained for post-morterm examination. but we value the house spiders, so the opportunity to get the images below arose from a nice molt i found in the web - no spiders were harmed in the making of this post. :) and since she was a pretty big girl, only select parts could be fitted into the frame at any one time.
so far, i've resisted the meme thing. (in fact, i just had to look up meme to make sure i was saying it correctly to myself in my head, you know, all the times i was repeating it to myself over and over while not doing it.) i've even liked the ideas of some of the memes floating around and thought they might be fun, but just never got on the bandwagon. i don't do the '5 things' or '5 places' lists on facebook either, don't take the quizzes, haven't made my pretend album cover. it's not a Statement Of Alternativity, a condemnation of those who do want you to know what five random objects they could reach from their chair right now, or five things they found stuck in their teeth yesterday, or whatever - i just know i already have too many hobbies i'd rather be doing. (like, erm, online scrabble.)
but at last a meme popped up that made me curious enough to try it out, and i liked the results enough that i might as well air them here. i think this is actually an oldish one, but schmutzie just did it, and if it's cool enough for her right now, it's cool enough for me. here we go, the top results in my browser's navigation history bar that come up from entering each letter of the alphabet. (i also find it interesting that for some letters, like q, the result seems completely unrelated and must have come from having a random string of characters somewhere in the url.)
a - arachnoboards (no surprise there)
b - in the bewilderness
c - cephalopod international advisory council symposium 2009 (here i come!)
d - daily coyote - everyone needs a little charlie
e - greenpeace
f - speaking of faith
g - grooveshark online music channel
h - phd comics
i - that damn island reef job
j - roger's old blog, das teuthologicon
k - krikit arts
l - the library
m - mimi smartypants
n - not exactly rocket science
o - the Onychoteuthidae, on the tree of life
p - a prairie home companion
q - how to make an origami bat (?!)
r - car talk
s - google scholar
t - the octopus news magazine online
u - ugly overload
v - viajera, my pen pal's new blog about life in argentina
w - info on a working holiday in germany
x - 1886 report (xliv) on the cephalopods collected by the challenger expedition
y - tomboy's blog
z - international time zone converter
in recent weeks i've strayed a bit from the Araneae (true spiders) that i had intended to feature exclusively way back at the inception of webnesday. in fact, embarrassingly, neither of the last two arachnids (whipspiders and harvestmen) can even produce silk, giving lie to the 'webnesday' title. and since reponses to the former ranged from 'coooool' to 'quite terrifying' to 'eight-legged parcel of terror,' i'll even scuttle back into the realm of true spiders with a nice charismatic salticid. there, everybody happy?
this vivid, fuzzy bundle of shoebutton eyes is the endearingly named Mopsus mormon, a large (to 12mm) jumping spider native to eastern australia (pics courtesy of tomboy again). her common names include 'green jumping spider' and (shudder) 'clown spider,' and the species apparently has an 'unusually large and complex' display repertoire for a salticid. being quite active, Mopsus is probably hard to capture well on film (or pixels), although tomboy did a nice job in the above shot. a quick search around the interweb (groan) revealed that several other photographers have also been lucky/persistent with this species, like this one (in particular, this shot). i know i'd love to get the chance, myself!
today's featured eight-legger is an arachnid, but like last week's impostor, it's not a true spider. (back to the Araneae proper next week, i promise!) this is a harvestman, order Opiliones, often called 'daddy longlegs' in the northern hemisphere (not to be confused with the other 'daddy longlegs' or cellar spider, Pholcus phalangioides). a friend of mine spotted it on the bank of the wahine river in the tararua ranges recently.
harvestmen resemble true spiders in having the correct number of legs (eight, like all the cool squids kids), but their two body segments (abdomen and cephalothorax) appear fused into a single oval shape, and they lack venom and silk glands, like whipspiders. most species have two eyes (instead of a spider's eight), one on each side of a small turret-like structure on top of the cephalothorax. there are some pretty cool SEMs here, and a couple of them show the eyes; you can also get a good look at them here.
harvestmen are able to ingest solid food in chunks (unlike spiders) and they have a range of interesting jaws/jaw-like structures. the one in the photo, family Monoscutidae (probably from the genus Megalopsalis or Pantopsalis, endemic to nz/australia - more cool pics here), has greatly enlarged chelicerae in some mature males - see?
crazy. i've never seen a harvestman that looks like this - the ones i'm familiar with have nice discreet, small chelicerae, like this. the function of these huge chompers is unknown, but some speculate that they are used to rip open largeish items for scavenging ('largeish' relative to the harvestman, that is). it seems, however, that bizarre-looking features aren't at all unusual in the Opiliones.
here's another nice pic, probably the same species, borrowed from the rimutaka trust (photo by k. alekna).
