Have got back from a long-postponed outing to forage for seeds and berries for guerrilla native plant gardening! Goldenrod, milkweed, Virginia creeper, staghorn sumac, brown-eyed Susans, etc. I saw two cottontail rabbits and a few black-capped chickadees. Plus, this small orbweaver (_Zygiella_) nestled in a staghorn sumac (_Rhus typhina_) bob.
#Arachtober 31: handsome little ice cream sandwich boi (male _Hentzia palmarum_ jumping spider) spotted back in August.
Damn, posting every day feels like way more work than it should. Anyway back to slightly less frequent arachnid posts tomorrow…
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae
#Arachtober 30: a lovely female hacklemesh weaver (_Amaurobius cf. ferox_) out in the open one night, rare for them. They spend most of their time in crevices in retreats of fuzzy back-combed silk that extends some way outside, letting them sense prey passing too close. People typically encounter the mature males that go wandering in search of mates and inadvertently end up inside.
The family is closely related to the funnel-weavers (family Agelenidae).
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #Araneae #Amaurobiidae
#Arachtober 29: didn't have time for a proper spider outing, so hopped over the garden wall to see what I could find in the yard—and almost walked right through this cross orbweaver's web strung between the dead coneflowers and columbines! As you can hopefully see in the close-up, her jaws are full of a big lump of mushed-up bugs.
#Arachtober 27: late October, we're getting frost warnings, but the orbweavers just keep on trucking. Taken just a few hours ago on a grocery run; the supermarket's large windows attract a lot of midges and are great scaffolds for the ubiquitous _Larinioides_ orbweavers.
#Arachtober 26: sometimes on a whim you look inside a hole in a railing…
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #Araneae #Clubionidae
It's still #Arachtober 24 somewhere: a tiny, curious zebra jumping spider (_Salticus scenicus_). It even gave me a little head tilt. WARNING: very high levels of cute
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae
#Arachtober 22: a hobo spider, _Eratigena agrestis_ (I believe), found in a big willow tree down by the lake. These European spiders are imports to the Pacific Northwest but there are a few isolated populations elsewhere, like here in Toronto. I always get a kick out of seeing them.
Contrary to popular North American belief, they are not medically significant. They are close relatives of the native, equally harmless, and far more abundant grass spiders (genus _Agelenopsis_) and make the same flat webs with funnel-like retreats.
#Arachtober 19: for spooky season, here's a couple of ghost spiders (family Anyphaenidae)! The first is an adult, possibly the mother of the tiny one in the second photo. They resemble sac spiders like _Clubiona_ and _Cheiracanthium_ but with distinct patterns of markings, and as you can see they make similar silk hammock retreats, here under the leaves of a _Silphium_ cup plant.
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #GhostSpider #GhostSpiders #Araneae #Anyphaenidae
#Arachtober 18: an Eastern parson spider (_Herpyllus ecclesiasticus_), a stealthy and fast-moving active hunter, feeding on a male _Zygiella_ missing-sector orbweaver. (This was right behind a female's web.) You can see the distinctive "knees" of the male's pedipalps in focus in the second picture.
#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #SpiderBehaviour #Araneae #Gnaphosidae #Araneidae
neville park