Sometimes I’m glad not to be a grasshopper:
Anelosimus sp. social spiders (Ecuador)
Nothing freaks out the arachnophobe in me more than social spiders. One of the more common arachnids in tropical forests, these spiders spin communal webs with hundreds or thousands of individuals.
Anelosimus, up close
photo details:
Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 macro lens
Canon EOS 7D
(top) ISO 400 f/11 1/250 sec
(bottom) ISO 200 f/14 1/250 sec
off-camera strobe
(middle)Tamron 11-18mm wide angle zoom
ISO 800 f/7 1/25 sec
A personal blog by Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild.
What’s more terrifying that social spiders? Social *spitting* spiders. That spit venomous glue.
That’s it. I’m locking my doors and never leaving home again.
LOL
Perhaps unfortunately for you, some spitting spiders are very commonly found indoors. We used to regularly see them cruising around in our Entomology building office and fed them curly-wing Drosopila to see their spitting in action.
Omg, who studies these things? So cooL!
Next to social insects, definitely the (close) second coolest category of arthropods, IMO.
I don’t recall ever hearing about social spiders until a couple days ago, browsing through your pictures as it happens. I can’t believe I’d never heard of them but they are exactly the kind of thing I would remember forever, as far as I know.
check these out – spiders stranger than you ever imagined:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Argyrodes
Sometimes? I’m ALWAYS glad I’m not a grasshopper.
So is there any reason why these spiders couldn’t be used for large-scale silk farming? It seems like the obvious choice if you want to keep a load of spiders in the same area.
You could rear spiders/spider silk commercially in water treatment plants, apparently:
http://membracid.wordpress.com/2010/10/30/happy-halloween-new-giant-spiderweb-found/
I just came in from canoeing & we ran into a couple of webs (one literally) of spiders all living together on webs on sticks in the Kankakee River (near the bank).
Do you have any idea what type of spider this might have been??