NOM NOM NOM
This zebra spider, Salticus scenicus, enjoys a midmorning snack on the side of my house. She’s eating one of the gajillion midges that plague my subdivision.
You can tell she’s female because she’s so fat, which just goes to show how insensitive you are. I, on the other hand, can tell she’s female because she is so very, very pregnant.
Leave her alone already. She’s eating for two.
…hundred.
So the other day I was walking in my yard and I saw this teensy little midge on the side of the house. (This image is rotated.) It was curled up a little bit, but was still alive. As I approached, however, it twitched a little bit in an unusual way, almost as if it were reacting to my presence. Midges are pretty oblivious, so that seemed a little odd.
So I moved a little closer.
I thought I could see somethng else going on here, so I got out the camera and zoomed in as close as I dared.
Hey! That midge has a spider sticking up from behind it! And those eyes are watching…
I moved around the side to get a full-on picture.
I have been reporting these spiders as Platycryptus undatus, but an expert over at bugguide recently reclassified them as Platycryptus arizonensis. Whatever the species, they’re still among my favorite spiders!
We have had a dearth of gr’oppers here at InsectPOD this Summer, and I aim to fix that right now. This little guy was about 15mm long. Didn’t seem too bothered by me, or by the praying mantis right next to him (I startled both of these critters while mowing the lawn).
Be sure to check out the larger version–the eyes on this gr’opper are really intense.
I want you to take a moment to appreciate what you are seeing here in this photo from Andrew Lin. The splayed-wide spider is a small jumping spider. See the fuzzy lump at the end of its leg? That’s a Steatoda triangulosa. What’s it doing up there?
Winning.
Andrew says he saw the jumping spider and ran to grab his camera; while he was shooting it walked right into a cobweb, much like the spider he photographed for us last month.
Thanks, Andrew!
[Edit: I wrote this post back on Monday, but InsectPOD decided to eat it. Not really sure. Maybe it crawled into a corner cobweb as well? I have try to recreate it as much as possible.]
Today is July 24th, which is a state holiday in Utah. It’s Pioneer Day here, comemmorating the arrival of the first mormon immigrants to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
When they arrived, the Salt Lake Valley was nothing but a huge stretch of hard clay desert, with a giant lake of salt at the bottom of it. The mormons said “this is the right place” anyway, and started farming. Oh, the wacky fun they had trying to farm the desert! But they did it–and just as the crops were coming in, the skies were darkened by clouds of crickets descending on their new crops.
Well, they weren’t really crickets. They’re actually a type of shieldback katydid, but they are a unique species and so bear their common name “mormon cricket”.
Mormon crickets eat everything in sight, including each other when they run out of other food. (In fact, one recent study’s findings were that mormon crickets migrate because they want to eat the cricket in front of them—and not be eaten by the cricket behind.) The pioneers were saved when flocks of seagulls suddenly arrived and ate the crickets.
Mormon crickets get over 7cm long. A friend once drove a highway and observed about one cricket in every square foot of the highway, and then shuddered to discovere that it was not actually a “swarm” year. In swarm years, you can’t see the asphalt at all. They are still a problem in farming areas of Utah. Nowadays we rely on insecticides. The seagulls are still here, but apparently they’d rather hang out at the landfill.
I have to confess that I mined this image off the Internet. I didn’t realize until two days ago that I needed to get a picture of a mormon cricket for today, and they’re not exactly plentiful anymore, at least not in the urban areas of Utah. So I pulled this image from wikipedia. The image is copyrighted under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means I am obligated to tell you that:
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
Are we tired of Platycryptus undatus yet? No.
Hey. I ain’t askin’. I’m tellin’. We ain’t tired of Platycryptus undatus yet.
This is the same spider that was on my window sill a couple of weeks ago. Normally when I shoot against the screen I don’t expect the images to turn out, but this time… wow. Great silhouette.
I don’t know if you agree or not, but I think this is worthy of wallpaper. I couldn’t get the dimensions right to make a good 1920×1200 like I normally do, but here’s a pretty decent 1680×1050 version.
Platycryptus undatus! This is one of my favorite spiders. (I showed one of these last year.) In the picture last year, I mentoned that they have a very recognizable chevron pattern down their back. This female is somewhat small and her chevrons aren’t perfectly delineated, but you can sort of make them out nonetheless.
This spider has been living inside the screen of the stairwell of my house. I kept meaning to catch her and release her outside, because houses are like deserts to hunting bugs: there’s often no water, and little prey. When I cornered her to catch her, she looked right at me and said “Hey! I’m doing just fine here without your help, bozo!”
You can sort of tell she’s saying that from this photo. See how wide her abdomen is? What you can’t really tell from this picture is that her abdomen is swollen upwards as well as side-to-side: this means that she is very pregnant, and that means that she is getting plenty of water and prey!
I left her in the window. As of this writing, that was a week ago, and she’s still up there. I kept an eye out for prey, and it turns out that in the morning light, any bugs that got into the house overnight move to the East- and South-facing windows. The stairwell faces South, and sure enough, it’s a spider bed and breakfast!
That didn’t explain the water situation, though. She is clearly getting it from somewhere: unlike orb weavers, jumping spiders can’t get all their moisture from their prey, and have to augment their diet with fresh water. Then it hit me: that window is directly above one of the sprinkler heads on my lawn. Three times a week, I spray water on her screen for several minutes!
So there you have it. Cute, adaptable, and obviously smarter than me. That’s why I like Platycryptus undatus.
P.S. She’s about 7mm long. Big enough to qualify as a “big” spider if you’re afraid of them, but small enough to qualify as a “cute little spider” if you’re not.
Sometimes the best identification you can make is “it’s a bug!”… but sometimes you can expand very slightly on this. Mahala Johnson sends in this picture of a mystery bug that I am upgrading to “it’s a cool looking bug!”
She suggests perhaps that it might be an aphid, but online research turns up no such beastie that would wear striped socks like this one.
Any takers on an ID?
Thanks, Mahala!
The conversation went something like this:
Julia’s friend: “Julia, you have a bug in your hair.”
Julia: “Really? Quick! Who’s got the camera?”
I can assure you that this would not be my first question¹. But Julia Faelt continues to be rockin’ awesome, and this picture proves it. But wait, there’s more! After the picture, but before pulling it out of her hair, they did science! Check it out:
“I’m pretty sure the species is Tettigonia viridissima. The picture was taken by a fellow biology-student last August, and it is indeed me the bug is sitting on - in fact we could hardly get her of. It was fascinating to follow how she moved her antennas - it was clear that she could hear very well, as she followed any source of sound (loudly speaking passers by, us experimenting with clapping our hands and calling at her…) with them.”
Awesome photo, Julia!
¹ My first question would have been, “I have hair?!?”
If you look carefully at all that battle damage, you might see a cricket in there somewhere.
I have to wonder what happened to this cricket that she lost a leg, most of one wing, part of the other, and even part of her… um… whatever those butt-spike thingies are called? Whatever it was, she survived, so you can make the case that she is, at the end of the day, actually pretty lucky. Here she is, looking pregnant and ready to inject some eggs with that huge ovipositor of hers.
It rained a couple of days ago, and this little lady decided to stop into our new office building to dry off. Her run of good fortune held true, as I was there to stop a coworker from squooshing her. In fact, I made said coworker trap her under a cup while I got a camera to take her picture.
I love her eyes. It looks like she’s wearing a helmet and peeping out from behind dark lenses. With all that battle damage, it’s not too hard to imagine a tiny little respirator going shkoooo-PAAAA as she relentlessly tries to hunt the cricket jedi order to extermination….
