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.
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