This is not going to be the most popular set of photos on the web this week. You have been warned.
One particular facet of spiders is how the eye pattern can be used to identify different Families, which can help pin down species, but by itself, it illustrates how much variation is visible within the arachnids, and
Several weeks back, I was contacted out of the blue (rather than out of the yellow or the aubergine, which are much less abrupt) by Catherine Scott, a biologist/entomologist that specializes in spiders she had seen some of my images on BugGuide.net and wanted permission to use them in a post on her own blog, SpiderBytes. After a lengthy and heated discussion on terms (me:
About a week ago, I noticed that another of The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog’s flowers was of the type that opens each morning (when the conditions are right,) and started planning to try again to capture this. Naturally, the weather went to yuck for the next few days after that, but I watched
This is probably the best photo I’m ever going to get of this, so I have to share. This is what spider sex looks like.
The female is the larger one, which is very typical of spiders. The little ‘legs’ seen here extending out to the front are pedipalps, and one of the ways you can easily (well, more or less) tell the gender of a spider, because the male’s are