#arachtober — Public Fediverse posts

#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

#Arachtober 12: a small yellow sac spider (_Cheiracanthium_) perches on a fence post and releases a stream of silk strands that are separated and carried aloft by the breeze and (as we've learned in recent years) atmospheric static electricity. If the silk catches on something, the spider can use it to bridge a long gap. Smaller spiders can be borne aloft entirely and traverse long distances, a behaviour called ballooning.

#ArthroBeauty #SpiderSilk #SpiderBehaviour #spiders #Araneae #Cheiracanthiidae

#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

#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