I’m a bit frustrated — this stupid knee doesn’t allow me to walk on rough ground. I can handle floors and sidewalks, but this part of my yard where Mary has been planting new berry bushes is mostly inaccessible to me. Yesterday, Mary tells me she has spotted some interesting new spiders on the leaves. Can I come look? Not without risking a fall.
It would be a bit much for me to hand her my Canon D8 with the 100mm macro lens, so instead I gave her a clip-on magnifying lens for her iPhone, which she was already comfortable using, and she went off into No Man’s Land and got a bunch of very nice photos of these tiny (less than 3mm) guys, and left me feeling useless.
Anyway , what she had found was a lot of meshweavers, small spiders that put down sheet webs, which they use to catch smaller prey, like aphids and leafhoppers. Meshweavers are a gardener’s friend, so it’s good to see them hard at work protecting our raspberries. This is a dwarf spider, also called a money spider:
And this is a pair of dimorphic meshweavers. One species, but males and females look dramatically different.
Clearly, it’s time for me to hang up my pretense of being an arachnologist and teach Mary how to use the D8. I’ll just park myself in a rocking chair on the deck and watch her have all the fun.
Spiders have what looks to be a metallic sheen. Is that why they are called money spiders?
It’s cool Mary shares your interest in spiders.
No, they’re called that because of a folk notion that finding spiders in your hair is a sign that you’ll be coming into money, and these guys are so tiny and use ballooning to get around that there’s a good chance that any spider landing in your hair could be one of these.
I’ve seen spiders paragliding around my house once in a while. Very tiny. I also catch glimpses of something rappelling into my upper visual field occasionally. These?
When I took botany so many years ago I recall labs where we were turned loose on flowers with dissecting microscopes and I noticed little critters crawling around inside the flowers. Spider food?
Useless?
Who’s doing the blogging here?
Buck up!