Full pantry

A couple of weeks ago, in a dark corner at the entrance to my carport, I noticed a tangly web, filling the whole corner. With a tiny spider near the centre. And an egg case she was guarding.

She's a common house spider, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, a good fly and moth catcher.

She catches more than flies, though. Last week, she had the leftovers from her latest meal hanging in the web.

Unidentified spider, probably Tegenaria domestica. Three times or more the size of his captor, not counting those long legs. Meals for a week!

How she does it: she stings the joints in his legs, where he has a flexible membrane rather than the hard exoskeleton, over and over, darting in and backing off before he can catch her. She knows her web; he doesn't, and gets stuck on the glue she avoids.

Spiders extend their legs using hydraulics, rather than muscles, as we do. To run, they increase the pressure in the cephalothorax (the head/upper body section), sending blood down the legs. Small muscles then return the liquid to the body, returning the legs to the relaxed position. So a shot of paralyzing poison to the legs soon invades the whole body. (From a previous post: see the entire story, "Unequal match: the sad story of Fang", here.)

When I found it, she had eaten her fill, and cleaned up most of the web she used to tie him up, leaving a bit holding that one leg. She eats the leftover web, too; spiders recycle.

The egg sac was empty yesterday, and no spiderlings were in sight. I swept up the corner and the messy web. I'm sure it will be back in a day or two.

The pirate is a cool cat

This teeny-tiny spider was climbing my wall last night.

Pirate spider, Mimetid sp.

She is about 3 or 4 mm. long (body only), and like all pirate spiders, has a comb of long spines on her front legs.

And she's wearing a cat face.

Meow!

The pirate spiders are all tiny, from 3 to 7 mm. long. And yet, their diet mainly consists of other spiders. Larger spiders, sometimes much larger.

To kill a large spider, "Kitty" bites him on a leg. Her venom, specifically suited for arachnids, kills him quickly. Then she eats him slowly, holding him with those spiny front legs, and sucking the juices out of one leg at a time; he's too big for one meal.

Crawling around under my desk and behind the furniture, looking for more spiders, I discovered many empty spider corpses. "Kitty" has been busy.

A couple of years ago, I found another of these here. The photos of this one were taken from a different angle, and she seems to be wearing sunglasses.

Cool cat!

The good people at BugGuide identified her for me.