#arachtober — Public Fediverse posts

#Arachtober 31: handsome little ice cream sandwich boi (male _Hentzia palmarum_ jumping spider) spotted back in August.

Damn, posting every day feels like way more work than it should. Anyway back to slightly less frequent arachnid posts tomorrow…

#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

It's still #Arachtober 24 somewhere: a tiny, curious zebra jumping spider (_Salticus scenicus_). It even gave me a little head tilt. WARNING: very high levels of cute

#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#Arachtober 17, part 2. It was shy and immediately went back in when I got closer.

#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#Arachtober 17: find the jumping spider! (Answer in next post.)

#ArthroBeauty #spiders #JumpingSpiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#Arachtober 14: The gaps between the wooden snow fence and the metal posts are ideal homes for jumping spiders and sac spiders! I found several bold jumping spiders (_Phidippus audax_) this way. High Park, Toronto.

#ArthroBeauty #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#Arachtober 10: happy #InternationalJumpingSpiderDay! Here is one of my favourite species, the peppered jumper _Pelegrina galathea_, seen recently. I find the females' patterns so mesmerizing. This one is brown but they can also be just black and white.

While I've found them in all manner of places, I've found that tansy flower heads are a good place to look for them. They like to make little silk retreats under the dense canopy of flowers.

#ArthroBeauty #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#Arachtober 7: can't go wrong with a classic, the photogenic bold jumping spider (_Phidippus audax_). In my experience they are shy at first, but if you take a little extra time and are patient, they become curious and friendly.

#ArthroBeauty #JumpingSpiders #spiders #Araneae #Salticidae

I haven't been taking my camera out much this year so I don't even have enough spider photos for each day of October from the past year? Crazy. Anyway, have a cute little jumper!

#Arachtober #Salticidae #Pelegrina #Oklahoma #Nature #Photography #Spiders #Invertebrate #NeverHomeAlone

#Arachtober 4: March mating mesostig madness!

These are an ubiquitous sort of soil-dwelling predatory mites, likely in the family Parasitidae (ironically, primarily predators) in the order Mesostigmata in the superorder Parasitiformes. They are only very distantly related to the whirligig mite I posted the other day, which is in superorder Acariformes. While the two superorders are traditionally grouped together under Acari, it is likely they don't share a common ancestor and should be treated separately. So I'm counting them as a different group!

#iNaturalist observation: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/275521159 :inaturalist:

Some pro-level photos and info about mesostigs: https://www.chaosofdelight.org/all-about-mites-mesostigmata

#ArthroBeauty #arachnids #mites #MiteSex #taxonomy #Acari #Parasitiformes #Mesostigmata #Parasitidae

Let's kick off #Arachtober with some fall colours! This beautiful coppery jumping spider—_Eris rufa_, maybe, or _Pelegrina_?—reminded me of autumn leaves. Tried to get an even closer pic of its iridescent scales.

#ArthroBeauty #DailySpiderPic #spiders #JumpingSpiders #Araneae #Salticidae

#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

#Arachtober 7: this mesostig's bristly, pointy face kind of reminds me of a hedgehog. Although similar in colour and body shape, it seems a bit more…rugged than the ones I normally see? More matte and spiky.

#MiteMonday #Mitestodon #arachnids #mites • #Acari #Parasitiformes #Mesostigmata

#Arachtober 4: a representative from the other mite order, Parasitiformes! The parasitiform group Mesostigmata does contain some infamous parasites, but many—like this one here—are soil-dwelling predators.

(Acariformes and Parasitiformes have traditionally been grouped together under Acari, "mites", but in fact they are probably not each other's closest relatives and deserve to be treated as separate groups. Don't look too closely at higher mite classification or you will go mad.)

#DailyMitePic #Mitestodon #arachnids #mites • #Acari #Parasitiformes #Mesostigmata

#Arachtober 21 × #LichenSubscribe. A European harvester (_Phalangium opilio_) in a wonderland of yellow lichen, I'm not sure what kind.

#arachnids #harvesters #harvestmen #Opiliones #Phalangiidae