Featured image: the newly described jumping spider Uroballus carlei resembles a caterpillar. Credit: Stefan Obenauer, iNaturalist.
There’s satire, cake, molecular phylogeny, and more in this round-up of all things arachnid. This month is very jumping spider-heavy—but can you blame me?!
Featured image: “silkhenge” spider nest in Tambopata, Peru, by Phil Torres.
This month: new peacock spiders, a new ZeFrank video, some really unique hunting and feeding behaviours observed, tips for spider-hunters, and more. Continue reading Arachnews: March 2019
This month in arachnid news: SpiderCon ’19, tarantula trafficking, horseshoe crab evolution, honeybee mites, newly described species, and more. Continue reading Arachnews: February 2019
Well, I’ve reached the point where people send me spider-related news articles, unprompted. So here’s a roundup of the interesting spider-related news and research that’s come my way this month.
Header: This image from Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban depicts a decaying Toronto City Hall surrounded by forest, on the edge of a flooded Nathan Phillips Square.
Trying a bit of a new thing. I occasionally do linkdumps via Twitter threads, but I felt like doing something more permanent. Title inspired by this ever-relevant @TechnicallyRon tweet:
2007: It's called a smart phone, it can do everything!
2017: Stare into the nightmare rectangle and watch society collapse in real time— TechnicallyRon (@TechnicallyRon) September 11, 2017
Continue reading Nightmare Rectangle Round-up: Municipal Finance, Black Widows, Migrants, and More
If you’re lucky and you know what to look for, you can watch mini wildlife documentaries unfolding in front of you. Back in late May I was lucky to witness mesh-web weavers courting and mating; I’m writing it up (including photos and video) because I couldn’t easily find anything else online about this intriguing behaviour.
So last November, I found dozens of tiny baby orbweavers in my bathroom. They were probably the offspring of the big grey cross spider who lived just outside the window, feeding on insects attracted to the building lights.
It was bad timing. Grey cross spiders do most of their courting and mating in the fall. The spiders guard their egg sacs into the winter, until they die. In spring, the babies emerge and go their separate ways. Most will die soon after; a lucky few will survive to continue the cycle. I don’t know why this batch hatched.
I painstakingly evicted at least a dozen, but the next day they were back. I decided to let nature take its course. Over the next few weeks, they gradually disappeared, to starvation or cannibalism or other insect predators. Then, one day, I saw one I’d missed. She had woven the tiniest of webs in the basil plant on the kitchen windowsill. All her siblings had died, but somehow she had made her way to this small oasis.
It was one thing to let the spiders starve to death when they were just black specks on the bathroom ceiling, but I felt a vague sense of responsibility to this lone survivor, and decided to keep her alive as long as I could.
So there’s a thing going around Instagram where you post a collage of your top nine photos from 2017, ranked by likes. Here’s mine:
Maybe not surprisingly, there wasn’t much overlap with what I considered my best photos! I couldn’t quite narrow them down to nine, but here they are, in chronological order. Continue reading Spiders of Toronto: #2017bestnine
If you follow my Instagram you’ll see that I spend most of my spider-watching time on the western waterfront. There’s an abundance of diverse spider habitats all along the Martin Goodman Trail, but there are several parks that are worth dedicated visits. Here’s a tour…
So last month, as part of my goal to find spiders in more locations around the city, I took myself on an outing to Corktown Common. The land, once belonging to a hog slaughterhouse (hey, Toronto’s called “Hogtown” for a reason), was reclaimed and redeveloped as part of the West Don Lands revitalization. Continue reading Spider Excursion: Corktown Common
