Subject: Some pics to share!
Location: IN USA
July 16, 2017 6:15 pm
Hello Bug Peeps! I thought I’d share some really lovely shots I got of some awesome specimens! You are probably the only people who will appreciate them, heh. The first two are spiders but the final one of a beetle was the best shot of all!
…
The second is a much better photo of a really pretty spider hanging out on my bathroom wall in Indiana USA. I looked it up and it is a spitting spider and spits a mixture of webbing and venom on its victims, so basically what Spiderman does but also poison which I think is very clever. I like the spots on the legs. I keep my fingers crossed that it will catch and eat the stupid fruit flies that keep getting in my garbage- they fly at my eyes and are annoying.
…
Signature: KLeigh
Dear KLeigh,
Thanks for sending in your image of a Spitting Spider in the family Scytodidae. Alas, we cannot currently link to BugGuide, but we did find some images on Spiderz Rule! where it states: “It is called the ‘Spitting Spider’ because it spits a poisonous sticky substance over its prey. Its body size ranges between 3 and 6 mm. They catch their prey by spitting a fluid that immobilizes it by congealing on contact into a venomous and sticky mass. They can be observed swaying from side to side, in order to cover the prey in a crisscrossed “Z” pattern; each of two pores in the chelicerae emits half of the pattern. The spider usually strikes from a distance of 10-20mm and the whole attack sequence is over in a little under 1/700th of second. It is a slow hunter and seems to use special long hearing hairs on its legs to locate its prey. It hunts at night and moves slowly towards its prey. When it is about 10mm away, it stops and carefully measures the distance with one front leg. Then it squeezes the back of its body together and spits two poisonous silk threads in one six-hundredth of a second, in a zigzag manner over the victim. The prey is immediately immobilized. If the prey is big, the spider spits several times. “