My first glance at Robert’s photos told me this was going to be an interesting study. It was obviously a wolf spider in the Lycosidae family, based on the easily observable arrangement of the eyes. Richard Bradley, in his recently published book Common Spiders of North America, put it this way: “Wolf spiders are easy to recognize — they all have an unusual arrangement of their eight eyes… Four of the eyes, the posterior ones, are large, forming a trapezoid at the top of the high carapace. The posterior median eyes are usually the largest and face forward. The posterior lateral eyes are also large and are well behind the PME on the head region, usually facing to the side or even backward… In front of the PME there is a row of four smaller anterior eyes.” [...]
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It isn’t a surprise that Troy was not cognizant of this species. It’s a small spider, and hides itself and its modest web well among the leafy boughs of trees and shrubs of forests and back yard haunts. If I search my back yard thoroughly in mid-summer, I may find one or two of them among the lowest branches of a pyracantha or cedar elm, but never does the spider or its web flaunt its presence. The out-of-the-way web it builds is oriented in the horizontal plane, so we humans are not as likely to realize we’ve bumped into one in the field, the way we are when we come across the in-your-face webs of ordinary orb weavers like the yellow garden spider or the arabesque orb weaver, both of which brazenly stretch their webs directly across our garden paths. [...] On 24 November 2012 Sarah A. Woller, of the Texas A&M Institute for Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, wrote that she had taken some photos of a wolf spider, and that while the spider was in captivity it exuded a mucus-like material that covered much of its abdomen. Would I like copies of the photos? Sarah, an outstanding photographer, had already sent me a number of excellent images, all of which I hope to post on bugsinthenews soon. I knew the products of her photographic labors would almost certainly be of extraordinary quality, and that led to an immediate reply in the affirmative. Not that I insist on using only high quality images here. Mediocre, even poor photos of important organisms make worthy postings if they are the best to be had. My latest micrograms, for example — which prove that shooting good photos through a dissecting microscope lens is an art I’ve yet to master — testify to that. But I digress… [...] My husband and I live in Phoenix, but we visited San Antonio this past weekend, and had dinner at a restaurant along the River Walk. It was a nice restaurant with an open patio. I had a sweater with me, as temperatures were brisk. I didn’t notice that the sweater had fallen to the floor while I ate and talked with friends. Afterward, on leaving the restaurant, I put the sweater over my arms and we drove to another place. Soon afterward I noticed that my right forearm, near my elbow, began to burn and become painful… [...] Meg has been collecting some spitting spiders (in this case, Scytodes thoracica), for me for some time now. Spitting spiders are easy to care for. A small fly for food, once a week or so, is all they need in the way of food and drink. They are not fussy about accommodations, as long as their habitat is dry and free of predators — such as triangulate house spiders and, yes, other spitters, which are not at all reluctant about eating one another. [...] Mostly millipedes annoy homeowners who find them, from time to time, inside their homes. Usually they show up one or two at a time, but sometimes their numbers are so great as to constitute a minor (some would elevate it to a major) invasion. When this happens the homeowner sees them as small, one-inch or so, light-brown-colored, hard-shelled “worms”. It is difficult enough to keep a house clean with these things littering the carpet, crawling around the house as if they owned the place. [...] The bright blue tint of its fresh coating of hairs faded slowly, over the next few days, to the more drab brown typical of the genus. Elizabeth placed it in captivity in a large jar so her grandchildren could study it during their regular visits, then watched it — and photographed it — until finally returning it to her garden. There it wandered back under a landscaping timber, returning to its earlier life as a denizen amongst the herbs and flowers, stalking its prey and enjoying a life of freedom. [...] These insects are fearsome looking, in both the larval and mature stages. The male fly is particularly terrifying in appearance due to its enormous jaws that stretch outward from the face a distance nearly half as long as its body. The mature female’s jaws, by comparison,are relatively short, no longer than the head, though they — like those of the larva but unlike the jaws of the mature male, which are used strictly to hold the female during, as Howard (1914) put it, the marital caress — are capable of delivering a severe pinch to a human careless enough to place an appendage within their range of motion. Even then, however, the pinch is of no medical consequence, as it is scarcely capable of tearing human skin and in any case is not supplied with venom. [...] On Thursday, 10 May 2012, at a large retirement community in Temple, Texas, I picked up two large beetles that had been saved for me by the Director of Facilities. One measured about 1.75 inches in length, and the other was slightly smaller. On the anterior dorsum of the body (the pronotum) of each of these specimens were two large black spots — that looked much like eyes — outlined on their perimeters with cream-colored scales; a second set of more vaguely outlined eye-spots were on the elytra. These beetles… [...] This is one of our most beautiful spiders, particularly when adorned in its most attractive phase, with the brownish dorsal abdomen decorated in reddish fringes and a coalescence of white spots that form, at least to francophiles, a fleur de lis, to others a cross roughly similar to the markings of the diadem spider (Araneus diadematus Clerck). But, then, only a fraction of the females of this species are so adorned. Most apparently display an unmarked brownish dorsal abdomen. I have lost the reference for the moment, but one arachnologist was reported to claim that E. ravilla only displays these white spots as a juvenile, and loses them at adulthood. However, the evidence suggests that at least some mature females — including Stephanie’s specimen (our present focus) and a specimen photographed south of Houston by Joe and Elizabeth LeBlanc in 2009, posted below — continue to sport them into adulthood, and probably throughout their natural lives. [...] |
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