Spitting spiders, and their living fossil prey, who new there were such things?
It's time for spiders from me again, This time not as gory as my first post on spiders.
I was thoroughly fascinated when I first learned about this species from a spider book I bought in high school.
It was even better once I discovered they were very common, at least inside my house, once I started looking out for them and could identify them.
They are very easy to identify, they look very similar to other long legged spiders but have a very characteristic raised cephalothorax. The larger characteristically raised cephalothorax is easily observable in the youtube video below.
I find them so fascinating because the "spit" web at their prey and hence their name.
Having grown up regularly bumping into spitting cobras I found it truly interesting to find a family of spiders that had also mastered projectile weaponry.
It is really difficult to observe them actually "spit" or spray a mixture of spider silk and venom at their prey but here is a clip I found on you tube where you can see this in action.
The local species in my region is most well known to prey on fish moths or silver fish
We had tonnes of books at our house growing up, my fathers personal medical library etc. and silverfish can really wreck these. As pictured below.
We took extra care making spitting spiders feel welcome after discovering this fact.
Whats also interesting is that silverfish appear very early in the fossil record and their direct ancestors that looked very similar to them may be as much as 400 million years old.
They were contemparies with the trilobites and early coelacanths. The trilobites are long gone...
silverfish are doing well...
...and coelocanths were only recently re-discovered living at great depths in the Indian Ocean after being thought to be extinct for the last 60 million years or so.
Man that's creepy. But facinating and cool. Can we call you spitting Spider-Man? Reblogged and tweeted!
My dog will kill a spider on sight. Hope he never sees one of them.
Yikes. That's scary. The chances of your dog running into one of these would be pretty low I would think
They are actually quite common and found all over the world
Fantastic stuff! You already know how I feel about spiders from my post on Cellar Spiders yesterday, but I think this is more evidence for their intelligence. Surely aiming a projectile in three dimensions must take a certain degree of computational capability?
Great videos as well! The sound track on the first one gives it a really trippy feel. The second one also makes me feel my hunch is right about house spiders being the 'cattle' of the spider world - they're the Cellar Spider's favourite snack too.
Yup, your post had me thinking about spiders, so I thought I would do my favorite!!!
Nice one!
Okay - I did my heebie-jeebies spider dance. I have no problems with spiders as long as they stay outside. I'm not sure if you saw the pic I took of a spider going after a wasp. Fascinating stuff....just outside. shivers
Hint: small quantities of Sugar mixed with Baking soda on a support in different places will destroy them (no kids, no pets).