When I was in Australia a couple of years ago I came across a
spider ant, which is a species of ant which mimics a spider.
I'd heard that there are also spiders which mimic ants, and lo and behold
when I was in Cuc Phuong national park near Hanoi I happened across one!
You can see that it's captured the shape of the ant body perfectly, right
down to the stripes on the belly.
I'm not really sure why a spider would want to mimic an ant, unless it
makes it easier to sneak up on prey. For that matter, I'm not
sure why an ant would want to mimic a spider, either - most animals avoid
ants because of their powerful bites, so I can't imagine that it gets much
protection from pretending to be something else which is also dangerous.
I saw a couple of other interesting bits of mimicry while in Vietnam, including
a very small spider which deliberately placed pieces of detritus in the
middle of its web and then sat amongst it to make itself seem like just
another piece of trash. There was also a small jumping spider
which lay flat on a leaf and bent its abdomen to the side, probably to
appear like a bird dropping, a trick also adopted by a moth I saw in Cuc
Phuong. And while we're on the topic of moths, I came across
one in - of all places - the bus at Cam Ranh bay which was ferrying passengers
from the plane I'd just landed in to the terminal. What was
unusual about this moth was that it was mimicing a hairy brown spider,
with a large hump on its back in the shape of a spider's head, complete
with dark "eyes" spread around the hump. |
There were quite a few of these tiny little orange colored spiders on the
underside of the leaves of trees growing beside the trails near the entrance
to Bach Ma national park, near Hue.
It looks like this one is putting its hand up in class to answer a question.
Or perhaps it's just asking for more porridge. |
| This
extraordinary creature is a two-striped jumping spider (Telamonia dimidiata),
the largest member of this family that I've ever seen. This
colorful beastie, with legs more reminiscent of a crab spider than a jumping
spider, was on a tree leaf in Cat Tien national park near Saigon.
Although it repeatedly retreated to the other side of the leaf as I turned
the branch this way and that, it didn't jump off and so I was able to get
a large number of photos. |
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From a jumping spider giant to a jumping spider midget, this one was by
far the smallest and also one of the most attractive I encountered.
Jumping spiders often have metallic green or other coloring on their fangs,
but the metallic stripes on this little fellow near the shore north of
Nha Trang were just amazing. However it was so tiny that I
had to use extension tubes in addition to my macro lens, and it was running
around so quickly that I managed only one or two photos before it got away.
I saw enough jumping spiders to put together a separate jumping spider
page. |
| As
well as the jumping spiders, there were also several lynx spiders in various
locations, like this colorful individual at Cat Tien. Like
jumping spiders, lynx spiders don't spin webs for hunting, instead they
search for their prey on leaves and flowers. Jumping spiders
have large eyes and excellent eyesight, but lynx spiders have small eyes
and correspondingly poor eyesight. This forces lynx spiders
to use a "wait and snatch" hunting strategy, rather than the jumping spider's
strategy of walking (and jumping) around until they find something.
The lynx spider strategy might also help to explain why most of them have
long spines on their legs; as well as possibly allowing them to detect
air movements and other hints of approaching prey, they might also help
to corral their prey within the grasp of their long legs, before moving
in for the kill. |
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| This
lynx spider was inside the imperial city of Hue, poised in characteristic
lynx spider style waiting for something tasty to walk past.
There were three or four of this same species in a space with a diameter
less than one meter. |
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There were several other attractive looking lynx spiders around, including
one
I photographed on the same flower as a red base Jezebel butterfly;
luckily for the butterfly the spider was a bit too small to tackle such
a large item of prey.
This
bee was not as fortunate when it landed on a flower which was also occupied
by a lynx spider. The ability to kill such a powerful and well
defended insect gives a good indication of how effective these spiders
are at what they do. It's said that if it weren't for spiders
then we'd soon be knee deep in flies and other undesirable insects.
Talking about flies, if you look very closely you'll see that there's a
tiny fly on the wing of this captured bee. It's so small that
it's in no danger of becoming the spider's next meal, and this family of
flies does very well for itself by quickly finding and taking advantage
of newly killed insects like this one. You can bet that the
fly is not here just for its amusement, it's either going to eat scraps
of the bee itself or more likely lay eggs on it so its young can feed on
what remains after the spider is finished. |
That spider's bee was recently caught, but this one has clearly been around
for a fair while, and it's attracted quite a swarm of those tiny flies.
As you can see, they have no fear at all and are perfectly happy to walk
all over the spider.
These is a rather oddly shaped spider, it was totally flat underneath,
there was very little distinction between its cephalothorax and its body
and most of the time it was holding its legs in very close to its body,
unlike most web weaving spiders. I'd guess that it was doing
this to make itself look as little like a spider as possible, in order
to avoid becoming a meal for the next passing bird.
If you want to see another oddity of this spider, just count its eyes.
Spiders have eight eyes, right? But only four eyes are visible
on this spider. Where are the other four eyes?
Well, there aren't any more! Spiders can have either four,
six or eight eyes, and the photos I took from different angles show that
this one has only four. |
 |
If that last spider was oddly shaped, then this one is even more so.
However unlike the previous one, this one is making no attempt to be inconspicuous.
It belongs to a family of spiders called "spiny spiders" (the genus Gasteracantha)
which rely on their unwieldy shapes and hard spikes to make themselves
a difficult, and potentially even painful, object to swallow.
It might also be that this spider's orange and black coloring is a warning,
since this combination of colors is used by many different insects and
other arthropods around the world to indicate that they are toxic or distasteful.
There are many critters that mimic their warningly colored relatives; if
the mimic is itself distasteful or poisonous then it's called a Mullerian
mimic, but if it's only pretending to be toxic then it's a Batesian mimic. |
Spiders adapt themselves to all sorts of environments. Like
the jumping spiders and lynx spiders, this one also hunts without benefit
of a web, though it does have silk strands attached to several of its feet,
perhaps as trip wires to warn it of the approach of items of prey or enemies.
Unlike the jumping spiders and lynx spiders, this one was hunting at night
on a tree trunk, and I suspect that its flat shape is an adaptation to
allow it to hide under the tree's bark during the daytime.
Another feature of this spider is the two long "cerci" which you can see
extending from the back of its body. Some spiders use their
cerci to draw out and manipulate the silk which is extruded from the spinnerets
on their belly (some silk is clearly visible coming out of the spinneret
of the spider in the previous photo). However, these cerci
are so long that I wonder if they can possibly serve this function.
In contrast to those very long cerci, you can also see that this spider's
third pair of legs is extraordinarily short, much shorter than its others.
Again, I have no idea why that would be. |
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| Another
roving nocturnal hunter, but with a very different shape. It's
come across a grasshopper during its wanderings and it looks like it's
used its silk to pin it down, either before or after being injected with
venom. Unusually, this grasshopper seems to have had chunks
taken out of its abdomen. Since spiders tend to suck up the
body fluids of their victims rather than biting pieces off them, this might
be a sign either of incidental damage caused by the spider's fangs when
it was pulping the grasshopper, or perhaps it might indicate that the grasshopper
was already dead when the spider found it, and it's behaving as a scavenger.
This seems unlikely, but of course web weaving spiders do wrap up their
prey in silk and return to feed on them at a later time, so perhaps it's
possible. |
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| This
spider has spiny legs like the lynx spiders and a pair of fairly large
eyes like the jumping spiders. This is a wolf spider, prowling
around looking for a meal. This is a female, you can see the
egg sac she's dragging around behind her. |
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| This
pale spitting spider specializes in eating other spiders. It
is a nocturnal hunter with very poor eyesight, it leaves its nest at night
to go hunting, catching its prey by spitting a mixture of sticky silk and
venom from its fangs. Ironically, this species is preyed on
by other spiders, and this particular individual is in an especially risky
situation, since the famous jumping spider Portia labiata is unusually
partial to eating pale spitting spiders with eggs. |
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| This
is perhaps the most amazing spider I've ever seen. It was the
strangely shaped abdomen that first made me take notice, and only when
I got home did I notice the transparent window in the abdomen.
It took a little bit longer before I realized what was visible through
the window - eggs! This spider had several dozen babies with
it on the web it had built on a wide piece of grass, and it looks like
it has several dozen more eggs waiting to be hatched. I don't
know whether it lays the eggs within the nest or whether it possibly gives
live birth to the babies. |
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| This
spider looks very similar to the wolf spider earlier on this page, but
it's actually a funnel web spider, with a serious frass problem.
In case you don't know, frass is what a caterpillar leaves behind after
a hearty meal - and since caterpillars are basically just eating machines
it's no surprise that they're also frass factories. It's enough
to drive a house-proud spider to tears, though the bulbous ends on the
pedipalps at the front of this spider makes me think that it's probably
male, so maybe it's not too concerned about having a mess around the place. |
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| Another
funnel web spider, this time in Bach Ma national park. It rained
most of the time I was there, which is why there are so many drops of water
visible in this photo. True to their name, funnel web spiders
weave a funnel-shaped web which leads either horizontally or vertically
inwards. As well as leading prey towards the spider, the web
also provides a refuge into which the spider can retreat when danger threatens. |
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| Another
resident of Bach Ma, captured as the rain continued into the night.
This is a fairly good sized spider, and the slightly unusual green coloring
makes it interesting, too. Notice the two little claws at the
end of the foot on the left-hand side of the picture, which are almost
identical in appearance to the two claws on the
red lacewing butterfly I photographed at night in Cat Tien.
In both cases the claws allow the critter to hang on to the edges of leaves,
and to get their grip on other footholds. |
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| Here's
a giant spider - a giant wood spider (Nephila maculata) to be precise.
This hand-sized spider is harmless to humans but it spins the largest web
of any species of spider. As you can see, this one is using
its back legs to lay out silk across the radiating strands of the framework
it's already created. I have a
whole page of giant wood spider photos that I took in Japan and although
they were shot on film and are much grainier than this photo, I seemed
to do a better job there with the exposure. |
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Giant wood spiders are quite large, but this Thailand black tarantula is
a much more daunting prospect, with its large body, fat legs and enormous
fangs. I was walking back down the road to the entrance of
Bach Ma national park when I noticed this burrow in a dirt bank.
It looked a lot like quite a few other burrows I'd seen, except that it
was lined with silk. I had a pretty good idea what that meant,
so I got a small stick and started poking the silk in a way that I hoped
was reminiscent of an insect. I've done that sort of thing
quite a bit in the desert in southern California and Nevada, but never
with any success.
This time however I got quite a response as this tarantula rushed out and
reared up, making me jump quite some distance backwards! Theoretically
I didn't have to do that, since most tarantulas are said to have a bite
no worse than the sting of a wasp, but that sort of logical thinking didn't
have much effect over the sheer tingly terror I was feeling!
The spider retreated back into its lair but of course I wanted to get some
photos, so I used the twig to bring it back out a few more times.
I didn't get an opportunity to see its top side because of this pose that
it adopted, but I wasn't too bothered because this view of its fangs is
impressive too. A spider as large as this one can take some
quite large prey, including lizards and mice; you can see the remains of
a previous meal near the bottom left-hand corner of the photo, probably
the leg or antenna of some hapless insect. |
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Check
out the Butterflies of Vietnam,
the
Bugs of Indonesia and the
Bugs of Russia.
|
