It's a Ladybird Spider! - Observation of the Week, 8/31/20

Our Observation of the Week is this Ladybird Spider (Rote Röhrenspinne), seen in Germany by @corinnah!

Corinna Herr is currently a master’s student at the University of Freiburg, and she discovered iNaturalist last year, when someone at the university told her about it while on a trip to Romania. “Since that trip,” she says

I have been using INaturalist to improve my knowledge of species and to help generate knowledge about the distribution of species through my own observations. As often as possible I go outside with my camera to explore nature and upload my findings.

She also shares her photos on Instagram, telling me “I try to inspire people for the world of insects and our other little fellow creatures. I'm not a professional photographer, but I'm trying my best to improve my skills.” So she was very excited to go on a trip with nature photographer Joachim Wimmer to the Kaiserstuhl in southwest Germany, an area of volcanic origin.

On the way…[Joachim] told me that it is possible to see [ladybird spiders] there this day. I had never seen this spider myself before. And actually he was right: we saw two male individuals on our tour through the hilly landscape. Their striking coloring made them easy to spot on the dry ground. I was fascinated by their extraordinary appearance immediately! At first, the individual in the photo was running around but calmed down soon, so that it was possible to photograph it and hold it in my hands.

Ladybird spiders are members of the Ereside, or velvet spider family, and can be found across much of Eurasia. They build tubes of silk in crevices or tree bark, and one female’s tube has been measured at one meter (!) in length. (Miller, et al. 2012) Females lack the red coloration and vivid pattern of the males, and unlike some other species in the family, they do not partake in matriphagy. A study in Spain showed that ants make up a large portion of their diet, and they also enjoy dining on darkling beetles.

Speaking of beetles, Corinna studied ground beetles (Family Carabidae) for her bachelor’s thesis (above is a photo of her using radio telemetry in the Black Forest to study their locomotion patterns), and her master’s thesis focuses on both ground beetles and hymenoptera in grassland habitat. This habitat was recently created as mitigation for the construction of a soccer stadium, and Corinna has been studying the efficacy of soil transfer in bringing along insect species. They’ve found that it’s been successful so far, and she even recorded the first iNat observation of the Notiophilus quadripunctatus ground beetle in Germany. 

Once she graduates, Corinna plans to continue her work in nature and species conservation.

- Here’s a nice videodocumenting a ladybird spider conservationist in the UK, where it was once thought to be extirpated.

- This isn’t the first velvet spider featured as Observation of the Week, check out @vipinbaliga’s Stegodyphus tibialis find from back in 2016!

Posted on 31 de agosto de 2020, 09:03 PM by tiwane