#arachtober — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #arachtober, aggregated by home.social.
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#Arachtober 20: a tiny oribatid or beetle mite, likely suborder Mixonomata (https://bugguide.net/node/view/238862), ubiquitous dwellers of soil and leaf litter, armoured decomposers.
#ArthroBeauty #MiteMonday #DailyMitePic #Mitestodon #mites #Acari #Oribatida #Mixonomata
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#Arachtober 19: one of my favourite finds this year, a hister beetle (family Histeridae) carrying several phoretic (hitchhiking) Uropodina mites attached via "anal pedicels", tough but stretchy stalks formed from special secretions from glands in…well, you can probably guess where. The mites are harmless to the beetle and use it to disperse to new habitats.
More on phoresy in Uropodina: https://doi.org/10.1080/24750263.2023.2288847 :OpenAccess:
#DailyMitePic #Mitestodon #arachnids #mites #phoresy #AnalPedicel • #Acari #Parasitiformes #Mesostigmata #Uropodina
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#Arachtober 19: this cute little oribatid (found on a rotting log) seemed to have ladybug-like spots. These widespread and abundant detritus- and fungus-eating soil dwellers are sometimes called "beetle mites" because of their hard carapaces.
#DailyMitePic #Mitestodon #arachnids #mites #Acari #Oribatida #macro
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#Arachtober 12: Mesh-web weavers (family Dictynidae) are so small they can easily make a web in a single leaf. This one has caught a long-legged fly (family Dolichopodidae).
#DailySpiderPic #spiders #Araneae #Dictynidae #Diptera #Dolichopodidae
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#Arachtober 10: from back in June, a mesh-web weaver (family Dictynidae) back-combing a line of silk to turn it into a fuzz of nanofibres. Spiders like this have a special sieve-like silk-making organ called a cribellum. This in fact is the ancestral state of most spiders.
Cribellate silk doesn't use glue; rather, it melds with the waxy compounds on some insect exoskeletons. It doesn't stick very well to other surfaces. Later in spider evolution, spiders developed other types of silk that could catch different insects and support more ambitious aerial webs. However, for a minority of spiders, cribellate silk still works just fine.
More details in this 2017 paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2017.0363 :OpenAccess:
#DailySpiderVid #arachnids #spiders #Araneae #Dictynidae #SpiderSilk #SpiderBehaviour #OpenAccess