Hmmmm, what do we have here? I was just about to do this week’s Just Once post and decided on the specimen below, in honor of Halloween (which is when it originally posted nine years ago):
… which you gotta admit is a nice, ominous image, and as I said then, I wanted to do this in the yard some Halloween, or perhaps up on the rooftop. I never did get around to it, mostly because finding the raw materials in the size I wanted to do it wasn’t happening.
Though as I got ready to do this post, I searched BugGuide.net on the name (Habronattus pyrrithrix, I think) to be sure that it hadn’t changed and it still looked like a good match, because I’m anal in that regard, dog knows why. No change and it still looks like a match, but, one of the images shown on that site looked familiar, and so I compared it to the video I’d shot a few years ago, where I’d asked if anyone recognized the species:
I had a post just about finalized thinking that I’d found a match and thus this species hadn’t been featured Just Once, but then I looked closer and realized that the cephalothorax markings seemed inverted. Other pics of the same species all show distinct black markings along the sides, while the center dorsal markings are usually less distinct if not almost missing entirely – but they all have those side markings, which my video specimen does not have in the slightest.
So I thought I’d solved a mystery by finding the species of the video spider, but now it looks like I did not, and thus Habronattus pyrrithrix comes back into the lineup as a Just Once feature, and the video spider remains unidentified. So much drama…