Last night, I bummed a ride with one of our campus groups to Glacial Lakes State Park, for the selfish reason of wanting to do some spidering. Unfortunately, the trip was from 6pm to 10pm, and have you noticed, it gets dark really early nowadays? I only had half an hour of poking around in the underbrush looking for spiders before dusk came creeping in and made it impossible to find anything, and then we had total darkness for a few hours. Disappointing.
The students I was with had a grand time at least, setting up a campfire and toasting up s’mores.
I do not like s’mores. Don’t deport me for being unamerican, please. I just find them messy, sticky, cloying, and no one ever has the patience to toast marshmallows properly, so they’re also burnt.
My time was not wasted, though. Before the darkness took us all, I did spot this little guy building their evening orb web.
I think it might be a Nordmann’s Orbweaver, which would make this a first for me.
For the non-spider people, here’s the park at dusk.
I don’t hate s’mores so much as I loathe marshmallows. Just give the chocolate pieces, unmelted and uncontaminated, please.
Don’t the spiders on the USA show up by using flashlights to make their eyes visible at night?
Ariaflame @ 2. If you use UV light, you will spot the scorpions as their exoskeletons fluoresce.
As Ariaflame notes, at least some spiders are easy to find at night. I didn’t discover this until I started using a headlamp, which is more effective than a hand-held flashlight because the light source from a headlamp is closer to your own eyes. I gather that the light enters the spider’s (or insect’s or mammal’s) eyes, bounces off something extremely reflective, then returns to your own eyes, so the closer the light source is to your own eyes, the stronger the effect will be.