Bonus pics!

Here are a bunch of old pics previously in the deleted Gallery; I have also added a carabid pic from this winter and a long-lost pic of the ironclad

Pholcid

Hoplia

Very likely Calathus

Pillbug and small ironclad (from “winter beetle hunting” post)

The world is a strange place

I have performed several more experiments with brown widows and pholcids; none of them were particularly successful because sooner or later I would send the poor animals running for their lives.

Also, I have decided to quit bugworld for a while! Invertebrate ethics can be extremely weird (see here for several morbidly interesting phenomena, including senility-induced starvation in Carabus) and it is giving me a severe headache. I expect to continue regurgitating advice in entomological discussion circles though; entomology is a dying art and I refuse to completely abandon it.

In the meantime I suppose that I will start posting more non-entomological strange things here (feel free to leave entocomments on my old posts though)

More arachnological comedy

probably a brown widow too, but identity uncertain

I managed to accidentally rip up this specimen’s web after getting not one but two prodding-sticks entangled in it, but it seemed unperturbed. Also, tangerine bits are not exactly the most cooperative of victims, either:

I revive slightly

Tanystoma maculicolle eating honeybee carrion

I have finally been able to access garden areas (mostly) free of small vertebrate droppings! Nighttime arthropod activity has been slow lately; aside from the omnipresent small ants (Linepithema humile?)  very few specimens are active. Even synanthropes like small carabid beetles and fat webbuilding spiders have very sparse visible populations, although I was able to find a very small number of foraging Tanystoma maculicolle and unidentified Calathus-y solid black carabids on many of my nightly trips.




Here is a somewhat blurry video of me trying to convince a small brown widow to kill a tangerine pulp “capsule”; it aligned its mouthparts with the fruit in a manner strongly suggestive of feeding. Unfortunately, it decided to run all the way to its shelter (not shown) after I jiggled the tangerine too violently.