Hello!
Since my last post, I've been pretty busy! And I still am, so I'll try to make this brief (as brief as I can with almost forty pictures) and interesting.
THE RARE FIND
A couple of days ago, I was looking for a stick to use as a stake for my Passiflora incarnata (purple passionflower). As I scanned the back of our property for a sufficiently large limb, I noticed a particularly twiggy stick--one that was wavy and had tons of small branches, well, branching off of it. I decided to leave it be, as it would be a waste of time to break the twigs from the main stem. I kept looking, but was unsuccessful, so I returned to the original stick and picked it up. A flurry of hair-thin legs caught my eye, and I held up the tip of the stick for closer inspection. My immediate impression was that it was one of the ubiquitous Tetragnathids that adorn every branch with their webs here in Mississippi, but as I held it up to the sun in the cool, but humid morning air, an idiosyncratic trait glared down at me: two immense, globular eyes. I gasped, lowered the stick, and (literally) screamed "no way!" over and over again for a solid thirty seconds. I whipped out one of my handy vials and blew the little critter in.
I still was not 100% positive of my identification, so I snapped a few pictures with my macro lens and sent them to a mentor of mine who also happens to be a spider specialist--and, coincidentally, the first person to discover this spider in the state. Within minutes, he replied, confirming my identification. It was a juvenile Deinopis spinosa.
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| The best picture I could get of the little fella. |
It has a body length of half a centimeter and likes to camp out in places that are difficult to photograph, so that's the best picture I've got--for now. Hopefully, I'll have better ones when it reaches full size.
The Giant Pet
Another cool find was this Dolomedes vittatus I stumbled upon at my nana's place. I was attempting to cross a great gully I encountered on my plant-digging expedition, and first hurled my shovel to the far bank, so as to cross more gracefully. I took a deep breath, adjusted my glasses, and threw all the power of my coiled legs into the ground. As I leaped sublimely through the forest air, I felt a slight tugging sensation on my right foot. OK, perhaps "slight" is an understatement. My graceful, parabolic arc quickly began to look like the third quadrant of a circle: some conniving poison ivy had snaked its way around my ankle.
I face-planted into a small plateau of moss, mud, and... more poison ivy, almost landing on the shovel I had tossed ahead of me for safety. My glasses, which had been firmly fastened with an eyewear container, flew a short distance--into the mud. I stood up, readjusted my glasses, muttered "confound it" (as profane as I'll get), and adjusted my glasses again. My leg hurt. I had probably sprained or even broken it on that long fall. I decided to test it. I could move it just fine. "Confound it."
It still hurt a little bit, enough to justify my being angry. So, in a fit of manly rage, I seized my shovel and plunged it into the soft, steeply inclined bank a few feet away. I was about to hurl myself up the embankment to collect one more blasted plant when I noticed a blur of motion.
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| The shovel featured in the upper right hand corner. |
I had been about an inch away from bisecting the biggest
Dolomedes spider I had ever seen.
Ignoring the searing pain in my left leg, I calmly pulled out a vial and, with hands that never trembled, scooped it up in one fell swoop. Actually, my leg was feeling just fine by then, and I could hardly hold the vial from the adrenaline rush, and it took me about five minutes to capture it... but I got 'er done. The spider, which I originally deemed to be a D. tenebrosus, was pretty fast--I had to catch it in one of the larger buckets I had brought.
I brought her home and proudly presented her to the world via Instagram.
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After a few weeks of fun, she died of an undiagnosed disease. She had began to act strangely, walking around at the bottom of her enclosure instead of skimming the surface. She had plenty of food, clean water, a good habitat for molting, and plenty of hydration (obviously). It was a very tragic experience.
She is, however, alive and well somewhere. No, it's not spider heaven and it's more than my heart. Check it out.
Thanks for reading!
References
1 Most insects don't possess nociceptors, and therefore cannot feel pain in the same way that we do. (The only real exception is fruit flies, but who cares about them, anyway?) You have google as your reference. A lot of people will say that the presence of nociceptors is not a good indicator of a creature's ability to feel pain, but there's no empirical evidence to believe that they do.
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