What do you do with a spider you can spot 10 meters away? You sneak up, take a picture, run for your life, then send the photo here.
A new spider has been discovered in Israel. Most new spiders are small, but this monster has a leg span of 5.5 inches. Though it looks highly mobile, Cerbalus aravensis is a spider after my own heart -- it's a sit-and-wait hunter. Nocturnal, and most active during the intense heat of the summer, it constructs a camouflaged den with a gotcha-door. When unsuspecting insects or lizards walk by - BAM - it strikes. Instant meal. That's lazier than fast food. It's right up my alley.
Thanks for the link, Jeff and David.
Photo source: 1) Yael Olek/University of Haifa. 2) Roy Talbi/University of Haifa
Here's another spidery tale from Judy...
What do you do if you have four years to kill and 1,063,000 golden orb spiders (Nephila madagascariensis) at hand? Well, if you're Peers and Godley, you enlist some help and weave an 11-by-4 foot tapestry.
I highly recommend reading the article to get all the details, but suffice it to say that these two gents spent quite some time hunting down apocryphal tales of articles woven from spider silk. They then duplicated the feat. It involved developing a machine to which 24 spiders at a time could be hooked up and milked of their silk. After about 10 minutes of being hooked up, and about 80 feet of silk later, the spiders were safely returned to their boxes. And just in case you're wondering: that saffron color is the natural hue of the spider silk.
Do you have a nasty case of what the doctor thinks is conjunctivitis (pink eye) that you just can't seem to shake? Are you a tarantula owner? If so, then you might have some of their urticating hairs embedded in your eyeball.
Such was the case in Leeds, England, when a 29-year-old man, upon closer examination, was found to have many tiny hairs embedded in his cornea. When asked about them, he immediately recalled a few days earlier when he had inadvertently provoked the wrath of his pet spider, and it had "“released ‘a mist of hairs’ which hit his eyes and face.”
I don't know how the guy forgot that incident, or didn't consider any sort of causal relationship. But let this be today's public safety alert. If you've been the victim of a mist of spider hairs, don't burden our health system by thinking you might have pink eye. Come straight out to the doctor with your tarantula encounter.
Thanks for the story, Judy.
As for these tarantula pictures, they are but some of the beloved pets of one of our resident spider experts, Jade. Thanks, Jade.
Photo source: Damselfly
What more could you ask for than an up-close-and-personal photo of a huntsman (huntswoman?) spider carrying about her egg sac. As a parent, it's hard for me not to give some grudging respect to this creepy-crawly with her parental devotion.
The spiderlings will go through several molts while still with their mother, giving them a few precious weeks of having her attention while their exoskeletons harden. Once again, as a parent, I can empathize with her. I'm not looking forward to the day when my own kids' exoskeletons sufficiently harden and they scatter to make their own way in life.
The Bug Lady is running a great blog for all of you who like creepy, crawly things. She's invited me to partake of her many photos, and I was more than happy to dig around. I bring to you her Brazilian Wandering Spider.
As she discusses in her post regarding Phoneutria Nigriventer, most spiders don't have very toxic venom, they don't inject much in terms of volume, they aren't aggressive (note how most scamper away at any sign of danger), and most have fangs that are too small to propertly pierce the human hide.
The Brazilian wandering spider defies all of that.
These beasts are large and aggressive, with masssive fangs. Also, they have some of the most toxic venom of all spiders (though it's rarely fatal to humans). When threatened, they go on the attack and bite repeatedly. And since they don't spin webs, they wander...often times into your shoes. Nearly half of all medically significant spider bites in Brazil are attributable to this single speces.
So, next time you're in Brazil, take that extra moment to check your shoes and your underpants. It just might save you a trip to the doctors.
Thanks, Bug Lady.
Behold the wrathful countenance of the whip scorpion!
More specifically, this is a tailless whip scorpion, from which its scientific name of Amblypigid is derived. What does amblypigid mean? It's Latin for 'blunt rump.' Hmm. I never thought I'd have something in common with an arachnid before.
Photo source: Andrew Snyder
Whip scorpions are also called whip spiders, which is actually a more appropriate name. See this here chart to see where they belong in the arachnid family.
UPDATE: I have been corrected. Again. This does not show the relationship of the various groups of arachnida. Rather, it simply lists them alphabetically. This is the danger when you blog in ignorance. I simply happened to guess right when I said that whip scorpions are more closely related to spiders than to true scorpions.
Seriously, crab spider, you can't leave flowers alone? I can't safely sniff a rose without fear that you might be lurking within its petals? You'd turn a wonderful setting into a place of fear and death?
This would be like if I were walking up to a pizza place, a place of peace and tranquility and happiness for me, and the pizza sign spinner guy suddenly attacked, right when my guard was down.
Photo source: Marc Dezemery
First of all, Happy Birthday to Ugly Overload. The blog turns four years old today. That's past middle-aged for a blog, especially given that I do at least one post for every day of the year. And as luck would have it, Blogger is showing me that this blog now has exactly 1,500 posts. That's a whole lotta ugly.
... a whole lotta hours ... with nary a cent to show for it ... I'm surprised my wife has been so accommodating.
Back to the uglies.
Laura captured this beastie in her home town of Redding, CA. She's wondering if its a barn spider or a wolf spider, or if maybe that's the same thing. Regardless, she let the poor thing go. Who could deny that plaintive look? It's actually pulling off a decent pupp-do-eyes face. It's now roaming the wilds of northern california -- a blessed couple of hours from me.
I'm thinking it's a wolfie, with those two forward eyes. Thanks for the photos, Laura.
Photo source: JETS Garden
What's worse than a massive spider as big as your hand that weaves webs at face level and masquerades about with the deceptively innocuous name of banana spider (Nephila clavipes)? The same spider, but with leg warmers.
I've looked this spider over, and I think I can just make out a Flock of Seagulls hair doo and pegged jeans. Maybe even a jean jacket. But it's hard to tell--spiders can be so good at camouflage.
We've all caught bugs beneath a glass, either to catch it and remove it, or else just to stare at it. But I don't think any of us want to catch one that looks big enough to knock the glass over. And look at those beady, red eyes: she's got plans for whoever caught her.
Prepare for shattered glass, a flash of movement, fangs in the jugular, then the skittering of hairy, chitinous legs as it returns to the darkness from whence it came.
Photo source: corblimeys
Mike Raiford has still more gems to share with us...
Why do scorpions floresce under UV light? No one knows. But we know how they floresce, though you'll slap your forehead when I tell you because it's so obvious. It's because of the Beta carboline and 7-hydroxy-4-methylcoumarin that emerges in the hardening cuticle of their exoskeletons of course.
Newly molted scorpions don't floresce, so the florescing compounds have to be either secreted by the scorpions or else somehow develop as part of the tanning process. We just don't know. Of course, I imagine scorpions are asking each other why the rest of us don't floresce. We must look so boring to them, what with our visible light band affinity.
Thanks for the photo, Mike.
Cindy needs some help in identifying this spider. They've been emerging from her bathtub drain for a few weeks now, and she suspects that they are young wolf spiders. She lives in Alberta, Canada. Any takers? I'm inclined to think she's right, since I think I see the characteristic two prominent eyes on the top of its head. Regardless, it looks to be recyclable (# 5). A green spider then.
What's cuter than a jumping spider? Why, a juvenile jumping spider.
Tracy sent this link to me, knowing full well that my daughters would ooh-and-ahh at it's cuteness. And she was correct. Wired Magazine has done a spread of photos for their spider awards, and this juvenile Phidippus audax took took the award for the world's cutest spider. Just look at it, dusted up with pollen. Can you picture it frolicking among the wild flowers?
Photo source: Opo Terser (of course) via Wired
But just in case you're feeling too cuddly towards our arachnid friends, let me leave you with this image of a Goliath Bird-eating Tarantula (the world's largest spider, who has evidently mugged someone and stolen their cash and trusty ruler). A friend of mine was walking through the jungle outside a village near Curitiba, Brazil, when one of these ran into his leg. He actually felt the collision. And like a true arachnophobe, he ran for his life...and was pursued for more than a dozen yards...
Thanks for the link, Tracy!
Photo source: snakecollector via Wired
Feast upon it, my friends. These are the only spiders that have ever graced my desktop. It's a collage of jumping spiders, in large resolution.
Of course, such a masterpiece requires proper citation. Brad put it together using photos taken by: alukii, Amery Carlson, imarsman, SouthernBelladonna, Charles Lam, Lord V, Photo_Freak, kartoffel, and ScurvyMouse. All these folks can be found on Flickr.
Enjoy.
Photo source: Brad
With about 5,000 species described and representing 13% of all known spider species, jumping spiders (Salticidae) comprise the only group of spiders that I like. Most are tiny, they don't spin webs (save for the tethers they use to jump with), and they eat pests in my house. Here's proof positive:
Photo source: ej
My property in the Sacramento Valley is blessed with an abundance of jumping spiders. Still, I'd gladly enlist more. I wonder just how many of the dead flies I find lining my window sills would reveal jumping spider bites if I put them under a magnifying glass...
Follow this link to behold all sorts of wolf spider mother horrors. But to give you a taste, enjoy this video. It's gotta be hard to get mommy and all those pups still long enough for a photo.
Thanks for the link, Pete.
Photo source: Afri
Scale me down to the size of one of the spider's pedipalps and insert me into this scene, and you've composed my worst nightmare (well, monster-oriented nightmare).
Thanks, Alan. You've ruined another night's sleep.
Terri encountered this spider in her mop bucket. Now, it takes little provocation for me to walk away from a mopping job. But this? I could legitimately get away with not mopping the kitchen floor for a month, since my wife is understanding when it comes to my arachnophobia. It might almost be worth the encounter...
Anyone know what kind of spider this is? The mop bucket in question is in Phoenix, AZ, USA. Is it a huntsman?
Thanks for the photo, Terri. That penny was awful brave for getting so close to the spider.
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