How does she do that?

 "No. No way! I refuse to pose for you! And besides, you can't see me."

So says this fat woodlouse spider, hiding all her eyes.

Woodlouse spider, Dysdera crocata. Her cephalothorax is a solid dark red. And these spiders have only 6 eyes.

And somehow, she managed to squeeze that fat abdomen down this narrow crack.

She's "an introduced species in British Columbia that originates in Europe and is now found worldwide. ... This species "may have arrived in British Columbia as long as a century ago, probably in pots of garden plants or ship ballast, with their favoured food source, woodlice (a group of terrestrial crustaceans)"(E-FaunaBC)

And the woodlice that hide under all the stones in my garden, and that sometimes venture into my house (where the spider is welcome to all she can catch), are the common sowbugs, Oniscus asellus, also an introduced species that has made itself very much at home here.

Sowbugs under a paving stone. Photo from 2014

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

—¡No! ¡De ninguna manera! ¡Repito; no me sacarás una foto! Y además, no me puedes ver; soy invisible. — Así dijo esta araña cazadora, Dysdera crocata, escondiendo todos sus ojos.

Foto: El abdomen y unas patas de la araña. El cefalotórax es de un color rojo fuerte. Y estas arañas solo tienen 6 ojos.

Y luego, no sé como lo hizo, pero logró insertar ese abdomen gordo dentro de esa apertura tan fina.

Es una especie introducida en Columbia Británica, originaria de Europa, y que ahora se encuentra en todo el mundo. ... Esta especie "puede haber llegado en Columbia Británica hace tanto como un siglo, probablemente en macetas de plantas, o en el lastre de barcos, acompañadas de su presa favorita, las cochinillas (un grupo de crustáceos terrestres)" (E-FaunaBC

Y las cochinillas que abundan bajo las piedras en mi jardín, y que a veces se meten en mi casa, donde la araña tiene permiso de cazar cuantas pueda, son las cochinillas comunes, Oniscus asellus, que también es una especie introducida.

Foto: Cochinillas debajo de un azulejo. Una foto de 2014.

Silk spinner

If it weren't for cold, rainy days, my computer files would be a complete mess. Good thing it rains here a lot!

Sorting last year's photos today, I looked at two spider photos from Oyster Bay last October. And I noticed something I didn't see at the time: in one of the photos, the spider mama is showing off her spinnerets!

Spider, egg case, sowbugs on the bottom of a log.

I had turned over this log to see what was hiding. And besides the usual sowbugs, there was a large spider's egg case, with the mother standing guard. But she decided I was too big to challenge, and ran away. I got her photo as she left.

See the spinnerets? Tiny, hair-like tubes protruding from her rear.

Spiders produce their silk from these spinnerets; according to the species, they may have from two to four pairs, each producing its own specialized silks. From this photo, I think Ma here has either two or three pairs of spinnerets.

Spider silk has many uses, and each variety of silk has its own special qualities. Even for the common orb web, the spider 

"... pieces together a minimum of four types of silk, each having a different form and function. One silk provides strength, another flexibility, and still another a scaffold to aid the spider during construction." (from "Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating"

But there are more things to do with silk, it makes a warm blanket for spider eggs and spiderlings. It serves as bungee cords, waterproofing, rappelling rope, wind catchers for ballooning spiderlings, cords for snagging, trapping, wrapping, toting prey. Den liners and trap doors, bubbles for underwater living, distant warning systems, gift wrapping ... the uses are endless.

And do the spiders make art? Do they know the beauty of a dew-laden orb web? Does a cross spider sit back and look at her web and feel a justified pride? Who's to tell?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Si no fuera por los dias de lluvia, los archivos de mi computadors estarían una maraña imposible de desenredar. ¡Un beneficio de este clima!

Hoy, mientras llovía encima de la nieve de anoche, revisé fotos del año pasado. Viendo fotos de octubre, tomadas en Oyster Bay, me di cuenta de algo que no había notado en ese momento. En una de las fotos, una araña madre nos enseña sus hileras.

Fotos: primero, la araña como la encontré cuando volteé un tronco en el suelo; la araña, su saco de huevos, y un grupo de cochinillas.

Había volteado el tronco para ver que manera de cosas escondía y sorprendí esta madre cuidando sus huevos. No se sintió capaz de enfrentarme, y se escapó, no sin que le sacara la foto desde atrás.

Segunda foto; ¿Ves las hileras? Son tubitos miniaturos que se abren desde el final de su abdomen..

Las arañas producen su seda a partir de estas hileras; según la especie, pueden tener de dos a cuatro pares de hileras, y cada uno produce sus sedas especializadas.

Esta seda tiene muchos usos diferentes, y cada variedad tiene sus aplicaciones especiales. Hasta para la telaraña en espiral, la araña ...

"teje juntos un mínimo de cuatro tipos de seda, cada de las cuales tiene forma y función diferentes. Una seda provee fuerza, otra flexibilidad, y otra se usa como andamio para ayudar durante la construcción. (Del libro "Spider Silk: Evolution and 400 Million Years of Spinning, Waiting, Snagging, and Mating")

Pero hay más. La seda puede formar una cobija calientita para los huevos y las hijas arañitas. Sirve como cuerda de bungee, impermeabilización, cuerdas para montañismo (en miniatura), atrapavientos para arañitas que van volando para encontrar un nuevo hogar, cuerdas para cazar, capturar, envolver, cargar su presa. Recubrimiento para las paredes de su cueva o túnel, puertas escondidas, sistemas de burbujas para vivir bajo el agua, sistemas de alerta distante, envoltura para regalos ... Hay mil y un usos.

¿Y será que las arañas producen arte? ¿Conocen la belleza de una telaraña en espiral llena de joyas del rocío del amanecer? ¿Será posible que una araña Diadematus se echa para atrás para mirar su telaraña, sintiendo un orgullo bien justificado? ¿Quién puede saber?

Hidden family and friends

 I went on another spider hunt, to Oyster Bay. I found only one, inside a rotting log, but she's raising a family. With plenty of company.

Mama spider, egg case, and a crew of sow bugs.

"And I'm outta here!"

I carefully replaced her piece of log as I found it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Salí otra vez a buscar arañas. Encontré esta, con sus huevos, todos acobijados dentro de un tronco podrido. Acompañándola, una tribu de cochinillas de humedad. Después de sacar las fotos, volví su pedazo de madera al sitio exacto donde la encontré.

Tall, tiny, tiniest

Yesterday (Friday) was bright and sunny, if still chilly. I wandered through the tall, shadowy forest at Miracle Beach, poking through the moss, peering under logs and down crevices in bark.

A corner of the forest. Douglas-firs, mostly.

Old, moldy Douglas Fir cone, with "mouse tails".

I turned over a broken branch, half covered by moss, exposing a small community of critters and fungi.

White, feathery mold. And a large pupal case, also coated in mold.

I was looking at the pupal case, wondering if the mold would have killed the critter inside, when something reddish dashed out from underneath and ran away. I chased it with the camera.

A very tiny spider. The sowbug is about 1/2 cm. long. The spider, legs and all is less than that; her body is about 2 or 3 mm., fangs to spinnerets. She was panicking; running back and forth, not seeming to be able to decide where to hide.

What I didn't see, until I got home and blew up the photos, were a few tinier red mites, and possibly a much smaller spider. On the red mite just below the grass bits, I can just barely see a leg. In other photos, the mites show up, but never in the same location; they were moving fairly fast, because I was taking photos as fast as I could follow the spider.

And then there were those other things; hundreds of them.

Or thousands? Each one has a dark spot, maybe an indentation, in the centre. If the spider is 3 mm. long, these would be 1/2 a millimetre at most. A dusting of miniature cup or birds' nest fungi?

Another sowbug. And two mini-sowbugs (top left).

And this time, on the way home, I counted 18 eagles, all adults. (The immatures are harder to see; they lack the white head, and their feathers are brownish and mottled. They blend in to the scenery.)

Tomorrow; fungi, I think. Or tree trunks. Or ... I brought home over 200 photos to sort and process.

Under a bark roof

At the edge of the estuary wetlands, a tangle of rotting, winter-felled trees bordered the path. What bark still remained hung loose; I peeled off a section, disturbing a family of sowbugs and an earwig in his bright spring outfit.

The wood is soft and wet, protected from light (up until this moment), warmed by early sunshine; a perfect hangout.

The next piece of bark housed spider egg cases on the underside.

Another earwig. I haven't seen one wearing this beautiful maroon colour before.

More sowbugs with frass.

I was interested in the leftovers, the bits of chewed and/or excreted wood, in various colours, stirred together like a vegetable casserole with a side dish of mashed beans.

Under another slab of bark, I found this beetle:

One of the Jewel Beetles, Buprestidae.* A wood borer, probably a recent hatchling.

(*Update: the beetle has been re-identified as a click beetle, Agriotes lineatus. The following paragraph, then, refers to the photo beneath.)

These beetles lay their eggs under the bark. The larvae hatch and tunnel outwards, eating the nutritious growing layers just underneath the bark. They leave characteristic tunnels, wider at the outer end (because the larva is now bigger and hungrier). They pupate, then hatch into adults, which drill an exit hole out to the big, wide world, and hurry away to find a mate.

Mined log, at Miracle Beach. The long, straight, central tunnel was made by the adult female; each little notch along its edges is where she laid an egg. Several exit holes are visible. Species unknown.

After each photo, I carefully notched the piece of bark back into its original location.

Gardener's companions

While I'm waiting for it to stop raining long enough to transplant seedlings, a tray of alyssum sits on my kitchen windowsill. I keep it well watered, and the word has gone out: there's a constant stream of sowbugs coming and going, loving the moisture.

There's also a bowl of lichen that gets sprayed twice daily. The sow bugs like that, too.

Sow bug on one of those bamboo "paper towels".

You can tell he's a sow bug by the two tails. Pill bugs don't have the tails, and roll into a ball when they're disturbed. Sow bugs can't do that; they just run and run.

Both pill bugs and sow bugs have seven pairs of legs, like their cousins, the amphipods in my tank. In this bottom photo, the seventh pair is partly hidden by a bit of trash. Usually, if the legs are visible, the beastie is running too fast to count them, but here, he'd paused to rest after I chased him all over the counter with the camera. 60 photos; two turned out.

Sowbugs and pillbugs live in moist environments outdoors but occasionally end up in buildings. Although they sometimes enter in large numbers, they do not bite, sting, or transmit diseases, nor do they infest food, clothing or wood. (Entomology, U of K.)

But they do get lost and end up in my kitchen sink. I catch them and replace them in a damp flowerpot. When the weather warms up, I'll be tossing them out the window into the flower bed.

A bagful of bugs

Over the winter, I wrap a few of my more sensitive potted plants in several layers of recycled brown paper bags. In the spring yard cleanup, the bags get their second (or third) recycling, this time shredded into the compost. After I remove the critters that have used it for their winter quarters, of course.

In the bags around my sausage vine, besides a humongous slug, I found a nice assortment of tiny creepy-crawlies.

A striped springtail, Orchesella cincta. Most of these were impossible to catch, and went into the compost with the bag. This guy was lucky.

A quick red mite.

There were quite a few of these long snails, about the size of a short grain of rice. (Update: Columella edentula)

Spiderling with a yellow belly.

As I demolished the bags, I brushed off all the little ones I could into a pill bottle. Before I took them outside and set them free, on a whim, I pointed the camera straight down into the bottle. I liked the result:

8 or 9 snails, several different springtails, a couple of spiders, and a handful of sowbugs. The mite is in there somewhere, too.

And then they all went out into the warm spring night to find a new home.

Gold in the dust

Found in the dust in a corner:

Long-dead sowbug carcass, spider webs.

Just because I liked the colours.

Of two-tailed bugs, absent salamanders, and flipped rocks

Well, we've gone out and flipped our rocks (or not - one of us cheated took an alternate approach.)

It has been a quiet year, probably because I forgot last year, and we lost momentum. In spite of that, we made some interesting finds.

VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE: I just checked Twitter; there are a bunch more Rock Flippers over there. I'll add them to the list in a new post.

Here is the lineup, as it is now, copied from Heather's blog, At the Edge of the Ordinary:

• From Pennsylvania, Kate of Outside My Window participates in IRFD… without flipping a rock! I guess we’ll allow that, especially since she found some nifty spider webs and a small mammal.
•  Here in British Columbia, I (that's Heather - ed.) did flip rocks, and after many tries turned up a couple of worms and a pill-bug (or something like one, anyway).
• Elsewhere in the province, (I, Susannah) face similar challenges with dry rocks, but still manage to find a few things, including (unfortunately) some non-organic debris.
• And to the south in Washington state, Dave Wenning of Wild Fidalgo flips rocks on the beach (and in his garden) and finds several Purple Shore Crabs. And a few other things. Even if he didn’t look very dignified doing it.
• Bill finds several critters under his rocks, including a beautiful millipede. (A beautiful millipede? Well, I think it is.)
• The WNY meet-up page includes a number of rock flipping discoveries, such as a lovely speckled salamander and a pair of slugs from Barbara Newman H., and a pretty black beetle and another salamander from Mark. I’m jealous – I wish I could have found a salamander!

Over in the International Rock Flipping Day Flickr group, many more interesting things have been discovered:

• Sara Rall flipped paving stones and came up with a good variety of small critters, including a rove beetle and a ground cricket. 
• Rob Cruikshank found ants and pupas, and a cute white springtail.
• Paul Fehringer, of Wild Spirit Education, found a red-legged beetle, and a strange (to me) centipede.
• And John Beetham found a spider with the intriguing name of Amaurobius ferox. Among other beasties.

And this was a handy tip: Heather had found a pillbug under one of her rocks. "Or maybe a sowbug," she said; she finds them confusing. So do I, unless I pick them up; pillbugs roll themselves into a ball; sowbugs don't. (Here's a sample pillbug.)

But Sara Rall, in the comments on Heather's post, gave us a quick way to tell the difference, even from a photo.

To tell a pill bug (which can roll up) from a sowbug (which can’t), look at the back end. If it has two “tails” that stick out you have a sowbug (which would be my guess in the photo, but I can’t really see well enough to be certain).

Here's a family of sowbugs I found under a paving stone next door:

"Two-tailed" woodlice, aka sowbugs.

Zooming in. See the tails?

BugGuide has a photo of pillbugs side-by-side with a sowbug for comparison.

Thanks, Sara!

As usual, there were a couple or more Rock Flippers who did the "work" but didn't pass on their findings. If you're one of them, either Heather or I would be happy to add your name to the list; just give us a shout.

And many thanks to Heather for hosting this year. And I hope it rains soon and she finds a salamander; she well deserves it!

Great Expectations - Interplanetary Rock Flipping Day, 2012

Is there a space rock in our future? Why not? We've flipped rocks everywhere else, haven't we?

This weekend, dozens of intrepid rock flippers have ventured out into the world to discover the wild critters, known and unknown, that inhabit the secret places. So alien to us they are, and yet so like us in many ways; our cousins, actually.

Here's a partial list of who we are and what we found. (Some reports are still to come in; I've heard that I should expect moose. We've got camels and leopards already.)

In no particular order:

• Troy Bartlett (founder - or founding member - of BugGuide; we owe him a debt of gratitude) took some amazing harvestman photos. See them on Nature Closeups. Butt shot! A stare down!
• Alex Wild, posting in   Scientific American, joins us for the first time, with ants and millipedes and an ant cricket from his backyard.
• Roberta flipped river rocks; some of her findings are posted in Growing with Science, the rest in Wild about Ants.
• Lynda at Mainly Mongoose doesn't flip any rocks, but finds toothy Dwarf Mongooses underneath some, anyhow. 

'There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world.'

• Margy, at Powell River Books Blog, for the second year running found no crawling or creeping critters. Not for lack of effort; what's going on with the shoreline at Bellingham Bay? At least she got some eelgrass this time.
• Patrick, a student of lunar petrology (Told you we'd gone interplanetary!), blogs at poikiloblastic.    I never knew a rock had defense mechanisms before! And he has a photo of a cute (really!) slug.
• Hugh, at Rock, Paper, Lizard, gifts us with another Interpreter wildlife expert story. "A rubber boa?" I'd never heard of these before. Yes, they do exist. Did they find one? Read the story.
• Clytie, at Random Hearts remembered. Didn't find critters, but there was a pretty heart, so all is well.

Some kind of twirly insect casing ...

• Olivia, at Beasts in a Populous City, learns a modicum of humility.
• Benet, at Walking with Henslow, flipped rocks in Starkweather Creek. Sow bugs with lime green spots!
• Pablo at Roundrock Journal, reports on another of his biodegrading experiments, and finds a cricket and a companion rock flipper; an armadillo.

Some kind of stripy insect casing ...

• Bill, at Fertanish Chatter, checks in with some pretty millipedes, a "nifty" spider, and is this a toad bug? A sight for sharp eyes!
• And then there's a toad, no easier to see than the toad bug. Judy's husband found it; Judy blogged it at LilacGate.

 Then husband said "What is that?" and I finally saw the toad, settled in for the winter.

• Kate St. John, at Outside my Window, flipped a rock, found a leopard. And a pair of camels!
• Rebecca in the Woods; an ant and a beaver. (The beaver was not under the rock.)
• Bug Girl posted an announcement on Skepchick, and a couple of flippers turned up in the comments. Here's Greenstone123's story. Ant kitchens! And scribe999? Don't give up. Not even in Jersey!
• Also in comments, on Rebecca's blog, Madhu in Sri Lanka found a couple of ants.  And Christopher (in Missouri) found ticks, and got too many tick bites to count. It's a wild and dangerous world out there!
• And on to the Flickr group! We have photos from Sara (mamasara4), from Georgia (georgiabkr), Dean (Ontario Wanderer), Benet (benet2006), Upupaepops (Upupa4me), Bug Girl (bug_girl_mi), and Pablo (Paul Lamble). Beetles, crickets, slugs, and so on, including an angry isopod, making threats to Upup...'s fingers.

Not under a rock; all around the rock piles. In blazing sunlight, on my grandson's shirt. Fuzzy, but I like the contrasts.

• And then, there's me. I still haven't written up my post. (That should give comfort to a few others who haven't logged in yet. There's still time!)
• NASA's stone is still unflipped. Of course, they take years, decades even, to get anything done. And there's always that transmission time to take into account.
• Update: Here's my post: Hard-scrabble existence.
• And an e-mail from Gail Bellamy reports, "Jamestown, New York----nothing but a few small ants----then a split large rock with the first layer had 2 black ants, but the bottom had a large fat toad resting comfortably. All are still in place." She doesn't include photos, unfortunately.
• Update # 2: Fred sent in his report from the Muskrat River, Ontario, via e-mail attachment. I've posted it here.
• Update # 3: And Mark, operating on the Celtic calendar, sent in his results today, Sunday the 16th.
• I think that's the lot. Have I missed you?

I'll send an e-mail with the list to all the participants, but feel free to copy this list and paste it on your own blogs. Thanks for Rock Flipping with us!

Wakey-wakey, little ones!

While I was looking for springtails, I rousted a bunch of other animals out of their cold-weather naps. There were slugs, of course; dozens of them. Sleepy sowbugs by the handful. And a few unexpected critters:

On the dry back of an old, crumbling planter box, this small spider was out hunting, still awake in spite of the below-zero weather.

She's another to identify. Ozyptila, a crab spider. Notice the interesting dotted lines on the sides of her thorax.

It was hard to imagine this delicate creature wandering around in the cold.

A lizard bark louse nymph, about 2mm. long, with undeveloped wings. The adult's will be longer than the body. I love the glassy legs.

Here's one on the rotten wood of the bottom of the box.

Blaniulus millipedes. Update: I forgot to add this: look for the tiny white critter at center left. I didn't see that until I was cropping the photo.

These were sound asleep, but as soon as they warmed up a bit, they uncoiled themselves and started to explore.

Every deep crack sheltered a few of these beetle mites.

I have to add at least one sowbug. Check out the antennae; they look as if they're made of metal pipes!

The cold snap has ended. It is now raining hard on top of the snow. The slugs will be waking up, hungry enough to eat the remains of my garden, in the morning.

Water makes all the difference

Rock Flipping Day 2011, continued...

It was a relief to come back to my own sheltered, well-watered garden after the expedition to the desert-like conditions of the vacant lot. (Between a rock and a dry place).  I recovered my enthusiasm for the search, and decided to turn over some of my own rocks. And here, the moisture lovers thrive.

A few rocks and turtles holding down the base of a wooden heron.

Under the rocks, an orange slug nibbles the heron's toes.

Every rock concealed at least one or two earthworms.

On the bottom of a paving stone, a clump of snail or slug eggs, and a woodbug.

Tiny white springtails. These don't tolerate drying out.

I thought this was a single snail egg until I saw the photo; it is covered with white silk. A spider egg sac, probably.

Millipede. One of many.

The large fake rock (styrofoam) sheltered hundreds of beasties. Slugs and woodbugs clung to the underside of the "rock".  On the ground, rove beetles and millipedes dashed for cover, centipedes and worms burrowed quickly into the soft soil, leaving only many more woodbugs and slugs.

Temporarily tame woodbug.

So my summer schedule of watering every night has paid off; the garden is alive, top and bottom.