Again, a little slow this week, finding mostly the same things that I’ve been seeing far too much of, and not seeing the things that i know are there, like the beavers – I keep finding evidence, but have yet to actually see one again. What we have this week are spiders, which is all the warning you get.
The coolest one, that I’d never seen before despite apparently being common, is this one:
Isn’t that coloration great? Excellent camouflage, at least during the day when the spider would typically be clustered up on a tree branch someplace, since this is the class of orbweavers that rebuild their large wheel webs each night, but hole up away from predators during the day. This is an adult female giant lichen orbweaver (Araneus bicentenarius,) industriously building her web right in the middle of the backyard, barely a meter off the ground. Well, depends on where you’re measuring to, really, since the top of the web was close to eye level.
I went out a little later on, once her web was complete, to get the abdominal colors better.
Largish at roughly 20mm in body length, she was very similar to the common barn spiders that are all over the place, except for a much better paint job, but still a lot smaller than the golden silk orbweavers serving as her neighbors. Very cool, in an extremely gnarly and creepy way.
The next one is less creepy, and even more colorful. The black knight butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii) had a moth that was not just motionless on one flower cluster, but at a suspiciously odd angle, and that suspicion was absolutely correct, once I got around to a better angle.
Now, I was almost certain this was a common species, but my subsequent searches on both BugGuide.net and within Ecosia did not turn up a match for those colors – or at least, not one that was positively identified; I found a perfect match on a generic crab spider info page that naturally failed to list the species that it was showing. I posted the image to BugGuide.net, but wasn’t getting any firm responses. I even tried Google Image Search, which only provided some suggestions as long as I excluded the myriad potential answers that were obviously dead wrong, some of which weren’t even the same Family. Then as I was typing this up, I got a response through BugGuide.net that indicated this may well be a white-banded crab spider (Misumenoides formosipes,) which appears to be the closest match, at least when you look at this image, so I’m tentatively going with that. Now, I’ve seen plenty of white-banded crabs, but none with this color pattern and the white band really isn’t there, so I maintain that I am blameless for not identifying it sooner – it’s my blog, so there!
Crab spiders are known for having color variants (just check out the various images of only this species) and individuals can even change color to match the flowers they’re on – to a degree, anyway, except this one appears to be aiming for as much contrast as possible. I mean, I would like to see one match the deep purples of the black knight, but I don’t think that’s feasible and I wouldn’t want them to hurt themselves trying. You might think that this color would be working directly against them, since they’re ambush hunters, but as I was maneuvering for good angles, this one demonstrated just how this might work.
Aware of my presence, or at least wary of the sun that had suddenly split in two and was moving far too rapidly through the night hours (i.e. my headlamp,) this one sank backwards among the blossoms and just about vanished, which might well be the typical ambush position. Moths are notoriously stupid, however, so perhaps no such behavior is even necessary. When I revisited during the day, it was out and semi-obvious.
The white band is supposed to be just below the eyes, the band of reddish-brown here, but apparently it can also be yellowish. I cropped tight enough to show that the hairy scales from the moth meal were still present on the forelegs.
And one more, because it’s convenient and we’re doing spiders.
While out for another nighttime observation, I was picking up a distinct blue-green star from atop a stretch of suspended screening, the telltale reflection from the eyes of a spider, and went in as close as I could get, between the inaccessibility of the screen and the lens that I had attached. It was enough to reveal (with the help of the flip-up softbox option) a six-spotted fishing spider (Dolomedes triton) wandering along the screen with a massive egg sac, much bigger than I would have thought she could produce, but there you go. Unless she’s sac-nabbing.
Now, you may ask how I can identify the species from this pic while I couldn’t from the much better images above, but the six-spotted fishing spider is quite distinctive, mostly from the white band (hey!) along the sides, but also from the ten white spots on the abdomen. Wait, ten? Yes, they get their name from the six spots on the underside, apparently, something that I have never actually seen since I’ve always found them flat on the ground or water. So why aren’t they named ‘ten-spotted’ for the easiest trait to actually see? Shit, don’t ask me, I’m not an entomologist or taxonomist or anything edumacated like that – I often wonder what the hell anyone was thinking when they agreed on the names. It’s probably some inside-joke thing akin to a secret handshake or something. At least the entomologists seem to resist putting ‘eastern’ in front of every damn thing…