Is summer over already?

Well, I hope not. I go a long time through late winter and early spring waiting for summer to finally arrive. And then it's over in a minute, and I haven't got any of my projects finished. Especially a summer like this one, where it never got really hot, and never quite dried out. I thought one of the dependable things here in Arkansas was an almost endless balmy autumn, but here it is, barely into November, and all invertebrate wildlife seems to be closing down for the year.

I guess I'm in denial. It's a fact, the weather was never quite right for what I wanted, and we didn't travel around the state as much as I intended to, but these are my complaints every year. Some people are multi-taskers (actually, scientific studies tell us, multi-taskers are extremely rare, which is why we get nervous when we see the driver in the next lane texting). I personally am a single-tasker (one might almost say half-tasker), it's the only way I can operate.

When I retired around the turn of the century (that feels funny to say), in a happy convergence close-focusing binoculars and digital cameras and through-the-binoculars-type field guides to butterflies all came out at the same time.  I spent every minute for a couple of summers chasing and photographing butterflies, and then I started studying robber flies, those hairy alpha predators of the insect world, and I had to concentrate on them for several years, because there were no field guides. Finally, I ended up making my own field guide. Next a good guide to tiger beetles came out, and I closed my focus only to them for a summer, then it was caterpillars, then grasshoppers.

And suddenly Bradley's field guide, Common Spiders of North America, came out just as I was making plans for 2013, and when I saw the wonderful paintings in it by Steve Buchanan, I was converted in a single second. I've always loved spiders, but there was no practical way of identifying them. Then this book came out and very difficult ID problems were solved instantly by a glance at the right illustration. I got the book, put the tunnel around my eyes so that I was unable to see anything but spiders, and got to work. Except for a half dozen spiders that were my favorites from childhood on, I really knew very little about this remarkable group. The moment things started moving in the spring I was deluged. I had often read those statistics where so many thousand spiders are found per square yard of ground. Now I began to believe it.

I quickly discovered that a number of spiders were in that 2 to 4 mm size range, which meant they were impossible to really see. Now, I had decided I was going to try to observe them unrestrained, and unannoyed, to see them going about their natural business. I wasn't going to put them in plastic see-through tubs for close photography, and I certainly wasn't going to collect them as specimens, poor faded shriveled-up things in vials of alcohol. This of course made identification that much trickier. My modus was, when I saw a new spider (several daily, when I was beginning), I would try to get a very close-up photo in a position which revealed all its markings. Then I would blow up the photo on my computer screen, and get out the Bradley, and, when he didn't entirely solve it, search through BugGuide.

I love something that's completely new, where every day I am learning new things, starting from absolute scratch, a learning curve so steep I hardly knew where to begin. And, using my total immersion technique, I did learn. I'm astonished now to look at our Picasa Web albums and see that Cheryl and I have put together images (my big camera doing the straight ahead ones, her tiny camera reaching around corners or under leaves) of some 170 species, over a hundred species just in our own backyard. If I still can't remember all their Latin names, at least I am familiar with the look of them and the design of their webs if they are web spinners. There are species I especially want to see that I have missed so far, but there are many more species we found that I didn't dream we would.

Unless there are some surprises still waiting for us this year we have more or less seen the season around now, and have a good idea what to expect for next year. Our first goal is identification and distribution, but we are already moving on to behavior, which is so varied and imaginative, if you can say that about an animal with a brain the size of a grain of dust. An ultimate goal is to make a sort of illustrated field guide to Arkansas spiders, especially those found on Crowley's Ridge, that anomalous line of hills that rises out of the flat Mississippi Delta here in northeast Arkansas.

For now, here is our first draft (our summer's work), for anyone who might be interested. This will be a perpetual work in progress. We will boldly add new species as we find them, and quietly erase errors as we discover them or they are pointed out to us. What we have are four Picasa Web albums, in which the arrangement of species more or less follows the arrangement in Bradley, which is one of convenience,  since there is no agreed-upon evolutionary order.

The first album contains the Mygalomorphs, large long-lived "primitive" spiders like tarantulas; and Orb-shaped-Web Builders, very highly evolved species like the large garden spiders).

click here

The second album contains the Wolf Spiders, a large group of often striped spiders that don't make snare-webs, but run along the ground, catching their prey by pursuit or ambush. They are quite numerous, and many are nocturnal. If you go out at night with a headlamp on, you will see their eyes by the dozens shining back at you; and Fishing Spiders, species that often live on or even under water, and sometimes catch tadpoles and small fish.

click here

The third album contains the Jumping Spiders, another large group of often brightly colored spiders that don't spin snare-webs, but stalk their prey like cats until they are close enough to spring on them; and the Crab Spiders, some of which climb to flowers then change their color to match the flower's, so they can hide on it to ambush insects that come for nectar.

click here

The fourth album contains "all the rest," a  motley of ground hunters and primitive hackle-web weavers, such as the Feather-legged Spiders, Black Widows, Brown Recluses, and the strange Spitting Spiders.

click here

I shouldn't be too cavalier about our ability now to identify our local spiders. There are still some, especially from my favorite group, the Wolf Spiders, that we have a lot of trouble with. I have pictures that I change the name on almost every time I look at them. But that's great, that's the fun. In fact there are species that cannot be identified without dissection, but that's okay too. I want this to be a pictorial guide, so for now, I just want to get as close as I can visually.

Here's a footnote: Because we are concentrating so hard on finding spiders, we are seeing for the first time a number of species that have always been right in front of us.  We are also observing behavior we would never have dreamed of. For example, I had always assumed that spiders require fresh live food that they catch themselves. But last night (11/5/13) when I went out with my headlamp to see if any spiders would be out in 61 degree temperature (in fact, there were dozens of eyes glinting back at me) I came just inside my garage where I had noticed two or three days before a dead paper wasp lying on the concrete, and there was a funnel-web spider scavenging the corpse. I was amazed. In fact spiders have done something to amaze me almost every day this year. That's my idea of retirement, miles ahead of daytime TV!

Frogs, toads, spiders, bugs, and a Spiny Oak-slug

I commented on an earlier post that we were overrun with baby toads. They are still around, often turning up in the middle of a picture when you least expect them.

But there are distinctly fewer. I don't know if that is just because they have distributed themselves more widely throughout the neighborhood, or if something is predating them. Not many things eat toads. When attacked they squirt out poisonous juices. If a dog bites one once, it learns its lesson, and never bites another one; if you pick one up I hope you know to wash your hands before you touch your eyes. However the other day I caught a glimpse of something disappearing into cracks in the wood of our raised beds and realized it was a baby Hog-nosed Snake. Though only about a foot long it flared its head and did its best to resemble a cobra/puff adder, and I was reminded that this harmless (to us) snake is one of the few creatures who not only eat toads, but specialize in them.

So if they have actually reduced the numbers of toads in the yard, that might allow the wolf spiders a chance to rebuild their decimated populations, EXCEPT now the yard is overrun by frogs. They are always here in summer, but not in these numbers.  Bronze frogs and cricket frogs are lining the muddy edges of our pond, and green tree frogs are lined up on the stalks of the pickerel weed, or plastered against walls, or doing their droppings on all our windows.

The reason you see them out in plain sight clinging to the sides of walls or high up in the aquatic vegetation is that they too have a deadly enemy who hunts them ruthlessly and is, itself, a skilled climber: The Western Ribbon Snake.

This past weekend we were at Ferncliff Camp west of Little Rock, where we teach a class in insect ecology every year, and we did a night op there, out with our headlamps looking for wolf spiders, and just as in our yard, we hardly found a one (though we found some other very good spiders). This is our first year looking closely at spiders, and it can be that wolf spiders are very common in spring and early summer, then thin out when the hot weather comes, which is why we are not seeing so many now. We'll need to do this for another year, so we can get a pattern for a full year. Anyway, perhaps we were blaming the frogs and toads unfairly. Recently a big fishing spider (Dolomedes triton), has been sitting up in the middle of the pond vegetation, holding its egg nest in a sunny spot to speed development. This is a spider that skims over the surface of the water, that dives under water when disturbed, and is able to catch small tadpoles and fish. Dolomedes are usually common in the pond, but I had not seen a one this year, and thought they also were a victim of the frogs, skillful hunters of invertebrates. But obviously they had been there all the time, hidden in the thick vegetation. Frogs, toads, snakes, spiders are here every year. Their varied offenses and defenses must average out.

Now what else did I promise for this blog? Bugs. True bugs, in this case, of the order Hemiptera. Along with aphids and hoppers and stinkbugs, this includes Cicadas, which are still loud on hot days, but are beginning to wind down. At this time of year you begin finding dead or dying ones everywhere you look. But they are still very noisy during the day. This has been a big year for cicadas. The loud calling of course is the male's way to get the attention of the females. But it didn't occur to me that I have never, for some reason, observed cicadas mating, at least it hadn't occurred to me until I looked down at my feet one day and saw a two-headed cicada.

Fulgorids in the tropics are huge bugs with big sort of helmet-like structures over their heads. In this country there are a couple of dozen species but they are all puny things that look sort of like miniature cicadas, none of them more than 10 mm long. In late fall of 2007 we had turned on our porch light to attract moths, and when we checked there was a bug on the light that was somewhat like a small cicada but that we quickly worked out was a fulgorid. Only, it was 20 mm long. We sent it to BugGuide, and even Andy Hamilton, the expert on these creatures, was puzzled. The one we saw on the light was on the ground dead the next morning, plus we found a second dead in a spider web. We collected these and sent them off to Andy. He had identified them in BugGuide as Poblicia texana, but in a note added "Now that I have seen some specimens, it is my opinion that this is probably not the correct genus for this curious species--in some ways it looks more like the tropical genus Hypaepa."

In BugGuide now, there is a specimen from Mike Quinn from clear back in 1988, plus he submitted a nymph from 2010. Someone else has a Texas record from 2009, and there is a Georgia record from 2011.

We actually had another attracted to the same porch light in 2008, a year after our first one, but didn't report it to BugGuide. Yesterday I again found one on our porch, this one tangled up in spider-webbing. I untangled it and kept it overnight. It was fine when I released it. I guess we will report this one to BugGuide, since it is the third time on the same porch. Here are some pictures of it.

And now, the promised Spiny Oak-slug. If you have studied moth caterpillars at all, you will have learned that not all caterpillars look like caterpillars. There is a group called the "slug" caterpillars. Along with their slug-like shape, and the fact that they kind of ooze along the ground, they are heavily armed with toxic spines and often bright colors to warn you that you touch them at your peril. There are several different species. It is always fun to find one.

A duel in the (front yard) jungle

This is what my thermometer said when we got up on the morning of August 15th here in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Early in the year I predicted that after a wet spring we would fall into an endless drought and searing heat. It seemed at the time like an easy prediction to make. Perhaps the only prediction we can make anymore is that we can't make any predictions.

As for the duel of my title: We also woke up one morning to find this on a pillar of our front porch.

Sometime the day before something had happened that left this rather grisly evidence behind.   A dead two-and-a-half inch long subadult Chinese Mantis was hanging there, its legs tangled up in the deserted web of a funnelweb spider. The mantis was holding some smaller creature in its spiny grip. Instead of its usual grass-green color, the mantis was a sort of oily black. The creature it was holding seemed to be a jumping spider.

I disentangled the mantis from the web and as I took it down horrible black fluid gushed out of its mouth. Obviously sinister things must have been going on. I set the mantis and its prey down on a table so I could investigate. The prey was Phidippus audax, a very aggressive large jumping spider, a big-game hunter for its size, though of course far smaller than the mantis, which was itself a very fierce hunter. What in the world had happened?

It was like a crime scene in all those British detective thrillers Cheryl and I are addicted to: I had to use all my forensic skills to try to work it out.

First of all, I need to eliminate a suspect. The mantis was tangled in the web of a funnelweb spider. But the web was deserted. Besides, it was a small web, which would have had a rather small spider in it, which would have run in the other direction if something as big as that mantis had blundered into it.  So that spider could have had nothing to do with this.  So let us suppose the mantis walked up or down the pillar. The smooth vinyl surface would have very few places for the mantis to cling to with the claws on its two pairs of walking legs (the forelegs are reserved for grasping prey), and it would have been crawling awkwardly, perhaps with a bit of slipping and sliding. Since there are numbers of these little funnel webs on the house siding it would not be surprising if the mantis got its legs tangled in one, and found itself hanging head downward. It would have broken out of it eventually, but while it was struggling it may have attracted the eyes of one of the many Phidippus audax jumping spiders that patrol up and down the porch. Here is what one looks like before it is impaled overnight on the forelegs of a mantis, and has sticky liquid spilled all over it.

If it saw something even as big as the mantis struggling and looking like it was in trouble, it would come over and investigate. Jumping spiders are very cat-like. They stalk their prey, and when they get a few inches from it, they make a cat-like leap, catch their prey towards the front of the body, and deliver a venomous bite.  I suspect the spider would have spent some time estimating the size of the mantis, and carefully triangulating the distance of the leap. What it would not have figured on was the mantis's ability, even after it was fatally bitten, to twist the forepart of its body around and in a flash grab the spider with its muscular forelegs and squeeze it in its powerful grip with all the nail-like spines pointing inward. There would be the spider impaled on the spines, there would be the mantis quickly dead from the fast-acting venom, but also, from the digestive enzymes injected in with the venom, with its insides turning to liquid, so that, in the normal course, the spider could suck out the substance. The liquid turning black would show through the mantises translucent skin, so that the normally green mantis would look black, and the black fluid would gush out the mouth when I picked the mantis up the next day.

All conjecture, of course. Perhaps the mantis wasn't struggling in a web at all. Perhaps the daring spider merely saw it and attacked and bit it, and the mantis turned and grasped it defensively, and they both fell off some higher point on the pillar and landed in the web down below. Phidippus audax (the 'audacious' jumping spider, its name means) is so aggressive that that would be just like it, biting off more than it could chew (one charged me once, when I annoyed it).

Okay, it's why I like jumping spiders so much. I've always liked them, and kept them for pets since I was a little kid. And I kept black widows and tarantulas and scorpions and snakes. Biting and stinging things, mass murderers, yes! The rest were boring grazing animals. I had a very tolerant mother, one neutral sister, and one phobic sister who was never allowed to find out.

More nice butterflies

In an earlier post I wrote about chasing after some attractive butterflies in early summer: The Olympia Marble, the Frosted Elfin, the Silvery Blue, and the Great Purple Hairstreak. Three of these have in common being in the group of butterflies known as the Gossamer-wings (family Lycaenidae). The other butterfly groups are more familiar to most people, the big swallowtails, and the whites and sulphurs flying over open fields, and the "regular" butterflies, the painted ladies, the buckeyes, the monarchs, the red-spotted purples.

Least familiar (and therefore most special) are the Lycaenids, which, I have written in another context, are to butterfliers what warblers are to birdwatchers. They are small, fast moving, often brightly or intricately patterned, sometimes appearing in great numbers, often very rare, always appearing unpredictably, always a pleasure to see, even the commonest ones. These are the harvesters, the coppers, the hairstreaks, the elfins, the blues.

Of the four species I wrote about in the earlier post, the marble is a white, but the other three were Lycaenids. Of the four special butterflies we have run into just now in mid summer, once again three are Lycaenids.

The first is not a great rarity, but it is so beautiful we are always grateful to see it. Some years there are a lot around, but some years they can be very scarce. This is the Juniper Hairstreak. A week or so ago we were walking along a dirt road at the Harold Alexander WMA, a road where we had often found special insects in the past. We were looking for tiger beetles, robber flies, grasshoppers, and of course butterflies. Recent rains had moistened the dirt of the road, which always brings dissolved salts to the surface, and freshly emerged male butterflies in their brightest colors were coming down to drink the salts, which they require to get into breeding condition. Cheryl spotted the tiny beautiful green butterfly (not much more than an inch wingspread) mud-puddling so intently it paid no attention to us at all. We could photograph it all we wanted, but, because it was at an awkward angle for us flat on the ground of the road, Cheryl enticed it up on her hand, to drink the salts on her skin.

A day later, taking advantage of the relatively cool settled weather, we were at Big Lake. A couple of weeks before we had been there and seen a few Bronze Coppers that looked like they could have been freshly emerged (the technical term is eclosed) from the chrysalis that day. Bronze Coppers are not only beautiful, they are also, in Arkansas, rare. Some years ago we found them at Wapanocca NWR, and then here at the Moist Soils Unit at Big Lake. So far as anyone knows, these are the only two sites where this species can be found in the state. It seems to be diminishing at Wapanocca, but it is getting commoner at Big Lake. When we found them here this year, we sent out the word, and a number of people had been here to photograph them. Now we were back checking on them, and they were everywhere, and we could not resist taking more pictures ourselves. The best thing was, the females were egg-laying on the water dock, their caterpillar host plant, which is common along the edge of the dirt path around the unit.

 
This was followed by a bit of serendipity, which it always is when you find a Harvester. You don't look for a Harvester, they just magically appear. This little Lycaenid has a subtle and quite handsome pattern and is noteworthy because it has carnivorous caterpillars. The female Harvester looks for some plant with an infestation of aphids and lays her egg on that plant, and the caterpillar goes off looking for the aphids to devour. But on this day it wasn't a female we found, it was a male who had set up a territory and was waiting for a female to come by (maybe they have as hard a time finding them as we do). The male carves out a territory of about ten feet along a path. He flies up and down the path slowly, showing off his tasteful pattern, and then he lands on a bush at about eye height looking around eagerly. Here he is on his bush.

Well, we don't have a Lycaenid for our fourth species; it barely counts as a butterfly. It is a Silver-spotted Skipper. And indeed we didn't even find the adult skipper, we found its caterpillar. The Silver-spotted Skipper itself is a nice enough creature which flashes a big silver spot on its underwing when it flies, but way too common to rate as being special. But you don't see the caterpillar every day, and get a chance to interact with it.

Cheryl found a rolled up pea leaf and unrolled it, and there was the caterpillar inside, immediately identifiable by its dark head capsule with the huge yellow fake eyes on it, to make it look like something dangerous to any bird that peaked inside the leaf roll. We had exposed it, so it went into its next defensive act, which was to open its jaws as wide as possible and try its best to look like the furious fiend from hell. We were impressed and rolled him back up.

Behavior watching

You get your digital camera and your macro lens and you quickly find out what wonderful subjects arthropods make for photography. Then you realize what a learning tool you have, and you blow up the picture you have taken on your computer screen and hold it side by side with the illustration in your field guide, and you match the details, and then you learn the name of your subject, and you read up on it a bit, and then you go back into the field and watch your creature with new, informed eyes. It's a funny thing, but most of us don't really see something until we put a name on it. But once we do, then we are set up for the next stage, which is to begin observing it, really seeing it for the first time. That's when you can start behavior watching, and the very most fun of all, trying to record that behavior on your camera. Maybe in the end I will get a video camera (Cheryl is taking more and more movies on her camera, and perhaps I will try to put them on this blog if I can work out how to do it), but for now I am very pleased if I can catch a glimpse of some interesting behavior just with a series of still photos.

Insects and other arthropods have been fine-tuning their behavior for millions of years, and they are sometimes bizarre beyond belief. Here are a couple I have seen in the last few days.

We have a black walnut tree and a pecan tree in the yard. We don't get nuts from them. Our chief source of pleasure from them is that from time to time they have an outbreak of Walnut Caterpillars. These are wonderful large shaggy black caterpillars, and during an outbreak the tree can look like it has giant tent caterpillars without tents. (They don't by the way do any permanent damage to the tree at all.) Here is the caterpillar.

Here, multiplied by a hundred times, is what they look like during an outbreak.

Now some caterpillars with long hairs have stinging spines and it can be quite painful to touch them, but these do not. These are merely long hairs. They are, however, a first line of defense. It's very hard for birds, for instance, to swallow many of these ready-made hairballs without quickly clogging up their throats and stomachs. For the most part, it is only cuckoos who have the specialized techniques for eating them. And the long hairs also cause some problems for parasitic flesh flies and tachinid flies and the ichneumon and braconid wasps who try to lay eggs or larvae on the skin of caterpillars so they can bore their way inside and devour them from within. It's hard to get through the hair and down to the skin. But the caterpillars have a further line of defense which is quite amazing and amusing to see.

If an ichneumon wasp or a hungry bird turns up in among the caterpillars they all begin sharply jerking their heads and tails perhaps once a second. The wonderful thing is, the hundred or so caterpillars somehow synchronize the jerking, so that they make all their jerks at exactly the same moment. The effect is not of several small caterpillars jerking, but of one very large and perhaps formidable creature doing it. No one quite knows how these insects, with their poor eyesight, manage this precise synchronization with one another.

But that's only the beginning of their talents. Now, as they bolt down leaves and grow fast, from time to time they must pause to shed their skins. While they are shedding, and hardening up after their molt, they are soft, inactive, and very vulnerable to predation. They don't use protective colors to hide themselves, so a large aggregation of them can be seen from a distance. I described them earlier as looking something like tent caterpillars without a tent. Well, tent caterpillars have their tent to take shelter in when they are molting. What do the walnut caterpillars do?

I learned what they do when I came out the other morning and looked at our walnut tree and saw a big ball of some living thing down near the base of the trunk. Here's what it looked like:

And here is what had happened: Every caterpillar on the tree (if you look carefully you can see at least three different age classes) left the leaves at the top of the tree and climbed down to the bottom of the bare trunk and gathered in this ball. Again with magical synchronization, they had all come down to shed their skins at the same moment. As a friend suggested to me, instead of a single vulnerable caterpillar lying exposed, this resembled a big hairy animal.

I kept checking on this ball throughout the day, and as caterpillars hardened up and were ready, one by one at intervals five or so feet apart they marched back up to the top of the tree.

The next morning nothing was left but a bag of head capsules and empty skins.

A couple of days later we put on our headlamps and did a night op looking for spiders. I have reported before in this blog that on an earlier operation I found a small colony of Scytodes spitting spiders living in the siding of one corner of our house, and coming out at night to hunt. This is a frail, slow-moving, and, I imagine, rather timid spider that has perfected a hands-off method of hunting. They walk up close (but not too close) to a suitable small insect, point their fangs forward and they spit a mixture of glue and venom at it. They shiver their fangs, making a criss-crossing stream that envelopes their prey. By the time the prey begins to think it is in danger, it is already pinned to the ground with the venom sinking in.

Well, this night I caught one in the act. Mosquitoes around the house roost in large numbers on flat sheetwebs of spiders. They must land so softly and keep so still the spiders don't notice them. And being on the web must give them protection from most non-spider predators. But not this lone mosquito, which made the mistake of roosting on a scrap of Scytodes web.

In this first picture the spider is walking slowly towards the mosquito, spitting as it goes. It looks like a wing and a leg are beginning to get matted up.

In the second picture, slightly more from the side, you can see the chelicerae on the side towards us held out towards the mosquito, with the fang swiveled out (from this angle we can't see the fang on the far side). One wing and one leg are definitely tied up.

In the third picture the legs are completely tied up, the fangs still spitting. You can't actually see the stream of spit. For one thing, this is taken at night with a flash. But many years ago we watched in broad daylight as a spitting spider caught a fly, but we still couldn't see the stream, only little dots appearing where it struck the ground in a ring around the fly.

Let's look at the last two pictures from closer up to see more detail.

We didn't actually see the shivering of the fangs. We only read about that afterward. But the next chance we get, we will watch for that carefully. The more you observe, the more you learn. The more you learn, the more you actually see. For instance, the day after we saw the ball of walnut caterpillars here, we were out at Big Lake, and spotted a ball of walnut caterpillars at the base of a pecan tree there. Without our new knowledge, we would never have noticed it.

What's going on around the house lately.

In a blog devoted to invertebrates it might seem inappropriate to mention things with backbones, but our yard is completely overrun with tiny Fowler's Toads. They have only newly emerged from tadpoles and are about half an inch long, and they are in such numbers that as we walk through the yard they withdraw from us like a wave from an outgoing tide.

They're very cute, like characters in Winnie the Pooh. If you notice, the black spots on the the back each have half a dozen red warts in them, which is the sign that they are Fowler's, and not some other species of toad. I can't help wondering what effect they are going to have on the small wolf spiders in the yard, each of which would make a nice mouthful for them. [Update: I went out on a night op last night, making a round of the garden, and I only saw about a dozen pairs of eyes looking back at me. It was as if the yard  had been vacuumed. Maybe I need to devise a toad vacuum!]

Also in the yard right now are a number of Five-lined Skinks. Here is a male with his reddish jaws. The jaws are not as massive and muscular as those on the larger Broadhead Skink. But perhaps to compensate, these retain their blue tails into adulthood. Both Five-lined and Broadhead hatch from the egg with brilliant blue tails, which they flirt around, drawing the attention of predators, so that the losable and regrowable tail is seized while the front end runs away. When the Broadhead Skink matures, it loses it's blue tail. It is so burly and has such a powerful bite it probably doesn't need to rely on deception.

Not in the yard but not far away in the Joneboro Nature Center we saw this more colorful Prairie Racerunner. Like us these days he is covered with tiny orange chiggers. And a little bit farther away, on Hatchie Coon Island we saw this also colorful reptile, a slow-moving Mud Snake.

But now let's get back to small things, which should be our proper subject. In fact as compensation I'll bring up the smallest things we have seen. Here for instance at 1-2 mm long is a False Scorpion, false I presume because he has no venomous tail. They crawl around in the leaf litter and seize springtails with their claws, but from time to time they also climb to the top of flowers and when bees or butterflies land near them they hop on for a free ride to the next flower.

We had seen False Scorpions here before (not recently), so we weren't surprised. But we also found a brand new tiny thing that we had no idea lived here. I have mentioned before that my study is almost filled with Longbodied Cellar Spiders, sort of a daddylonglegs that will gradually fill all the space in a room with cobweb if you don't keep them trimmed back. I had read that there are other species of cellar spider, but most seemed to be found in the desert southwest. It took Cheryl's sharp eyes to realize there was indeed another species of cellar spider around, and in fact there was a population of them living right in the garage that my study is located in. There is a reason I hadn't noticed them: They are only about 2 mm long, which is to say, virtually invisible. They are called Shortbodied Cellar Spiders. They have the disproportionately long legs of the common Longbodied Cellar Spider that I live with daily, but they are still very close to being invisible. They are so tiny they are difficult to photograph. But the moment we got a good look at them we knew they were cellar spiders. You see, when the female cellar spider lays eggs, she puts them into a silk purse that she carries everywhere with her. She carries them in her jaws, and what is so distinctive about them is, she weaves her purse out of so few strands you can barely see the the purse, so the eggs are in plain sight. Here is a picture of our familiar Longbodied Cellar Spider carrying her eggs, and here is a picture (hugely enlarged) of our new Shortbodied Cellar Spider, also carrying her eggs in that purely cellar spider way.

Our usual cellar spider has the normal spider complement of eight eyes, but the tiny cellar spider only has six eyes. Unlike the Brown Recluse and the Spitting Spider which have six eyes (I have showed you pictures of them in this blog: They have three double eyes arranged in a triangle), the Shortbodied Cellar Spider has two triple eyes, the eyes appearing on each side of the head like "normal" eyes. You can see it in these pictures.

What else is new around here? Well, we always have good numbers of fireflies in our yard (all you have to do is have grass in your yard that you don't mow very much and of course never spray), and we know that the flashing of lights is mainly to attract males and females of the right species to each other, and when they meet they mate. But we had never thought much about the next step. But what seems to be common in our yard this year, and I don't know why we have never seen it before, is that we have female fireflies walking around on the ground, and they are walking because their abdomens are so bloated and distended with eggs that they can't get off the ground. Here's an example of one with its abdomen almost double its normal length (usually the abdomen does not extend beyond the ends of the elytra).

There's a smallish spider common in woodlands here called a Filmy Dome Spider. The web is characteristic: It has a tangle of supporting lines, and in the middle is a rising dome like an inverted bowl. I had tried in the past photographing it against a dark background, hoping that would  bring out the shape, but webs (unless they are covered with dew) don't show up very well in photographs) and I only got pictures with the vague suggestion of a dome in the midst of all the other lines. But the other day I was up at dawn and in the backyard there was a dome web between me and the rising sun, and the sun lit up every strand, and I finally got a fairly satisfactory picture.

Now we come to the spider of the month: the Asterisk Spider, so named because it makes a web of single strands sent out in all directions around it, so that it looks somewhat like an asterisk. I have never found the web, though I continue to look hard for it. The spider itself is impossible to find out in the woods (you will see why shortly), but I found this one hiding inside my empty garbage can. After I had photographed him, I placed him on a bush in our yard hoping he would be induced to make his web, and he immediately did his disappearing trick right before our eyes, resembling so closely a bump on a twig that if we had not seen him do it, we wouldn't have believed it. Unfortunately instead of making a web overnight, he simply left. But we got some wonderful bump-on-a-twig pictures.