The black widows I adopted yesterday are taking their time to adjust. Here’s one of them:
Both of the females have scurried up to the highest point in their respective cages, and are roosting sullenly there, and are totally immobile this morning. I can tell they were active in the night because they’ve both constructed loose nests of silk, but are otherwise inactive today.
The male has disappeared from sight. I think he’s lurking in the moss.
You can tell how laid back these spiders are. I popped the lid off Urðr’s cage, flipped it upside down, and fussed about for several minutes trying to get a decent picture (that bright orange lid is not helping), and she didn’t so much as twitch. It was the perfect opportunity for a jailbreak, and she just quietly meditated.
Looks like its sitting on a piece of salmon…
Fishy as..
Not a redback but you knew that already I’m sure .. (No hourglass on its back. Also neither batting, bowling, nor fielding.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Australia_cricket_team )
It’s Latrodectus mactans.
How do you polish them to keep the sniny?
Does look very similar to Latrodectus hasselti* to my uneducated eyes – close relative? Same genus obvs.
.* See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redback_spider
One of the commoner & more notorious species locally here.
Spider Gel It’s a thing.
That picture has me thinking about Halloween now.
Ha ha you actually called her Urðr?
Cool, at this point do continue the naming convention using the other ominous triples,
Klotho-Lakesis-Atropos
Alecto-Tisiphone-Megaira
and maybe while at it
Chtulhu-Yog-Sothoth-Azatoth
and so on, it will look great on your notes.
@PZ: You might enjoy this, it’s about color but mostly uses jumping spiders and how they see as an example.
youtube.com – What Jumping Spiders Teach Us About Color by Veritasium
It is most likely the angle,
but I can only see six legs.
In front of the legs on the right side of the photo
it looks like a place where a leg used to be.
Don’t they prefer to build their webs in dark, secluded locations? Of course, getting packaged and shipped across the country might have been overly stressful for such a small creature. Losses might be typical.
I’m just glad you’re not ogling mambas or spitting cobras instead. As I type I spy another flattie on my living room ceiling. It’s next to the light and I get the “flattie” name now. It’s fine!
I would not react the same to a widow. I am pretty sure I ended a black widow with a fly swatter scurrying across my wall a while back. Shiny, huge, and stout.
And when I had a major incursion of ants after a reroof earlier this year a spider set up residence next to my door. Seeing pics from the site you did the purchase from it was a brown widow. It had incidentally died as collateral damage from chemical warfare on the ant invasion.
Flattie on the ceiling is safe. It lacks the fiddle that would also mark it for destruction.
But I am fine with those evil solitary sand wasps in front of my door that dig holes in my yard and do sadistic things to other bugs. I think they are cool and they don’t swarm me like the colonial wasps that like to build nests on my house and attack me. Bastards stung my ear a few times and I got spray for that. Bye bye.
The long jawed orb weavers in my yard are safe too. Earwigs and webspinners bug me because they cue that “is it a termite” response. That is not good for survival in my midst.
Geckos and anoles do your duty! Flattie is my friend too.
My mind sometimes wanders; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling_in_Christianity is a thing, but venomous spiders are not.
—
Huh. Business opportunity. Retirement income!
I mean, it’s brilliant, no? Bites aren’t deadly in any case!
I reckon, $5 to stick the hand into the box, $2.50 per squashed spider.
Set up a franchise, let the Xians prove their mettle.
(Oh, wait, that’s capitalistic Ken Hamistic type of thinking. :( )
[Ack! I meant -$2.50 per. After all, $profit$ is the goal. And spiders can be quite fecund]
[Xian Gom Jabbar]
Um… dude. I hate to break it to you but their name doesn’t come from missing males “lurking in the moss”.
;-)