Jessica's Spider Thread

General Off-Topic Discussion
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Okay, so there are a lot of spiders doing cool stuff in and around my house, and it feels kinda dumb to be flooding the positivity thread with this, especially because a few people have mentioned their acute arachnophobia to me. The spoiler filter is quite blurry, but also I’d like to give people the change to just opt out entirely, instead of needing to scroll past a bunch of blurry photos.

So, I’ll be post all future spider stuff here!

A list of previous spider posts can be found at these links:

  1. A fun fact
  2. Porch orb weaver post 1
  3. Porch orb weaver post 2
  4. Porch orb weaver post 3
  5. Porch orb weaver post 4
  6. Funnel weaver post 1
  7. Spider anatomy vocabulary, and porch orb weaver post 5
  8. Praying mantis, and spider updates post 1
  9. Spider updates post 2, and chickens
  10. Front door orb weaver discovery

I will still be adding spoiler blurs around spider images in this thread, because there might be people trying to overcome their arachnophobia by reading my updates, so I would like to offer them an option to voluntarily expose themselves to spider content incrementally.

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Have you heard of iNaturalist?

It’s a website/project where you can post wild flora and fauna for scientific tracking and observation of species across the world over time. People help you identify animals and sometimes make really cool discoveries of wildlife that hasn’t been seen for 100 years, things like that.

I think they’d appreciate your contributions!

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I have! :grin: I’ve been posting to SpiderSpotter, which is more of a specialist thing for spiders (since I tend to find those more), but I’ve also been considering posting to iNaturalist as well!

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I wonder how much apps rely on location data to guesstimate a spider identification.

Many years ago I picked up a copy of Ubick’s Spiders of North America and the formal identification process often involves the structure of the tarsal claws or the tergites on a pair of legs and things like that. My spouse and I ended up having to do a catch-and-release program to get macro photos of many of the things necessary for a lot of identifications.

But I don’t know how much that’s an artifact of the text being an all-of-North-America thing, and if it was narrowed to a fifty mile radius (or something like that) you could get a positive ID with just number and distribution of eyes, orientation of the legs, and easier-to-spot things like that.

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I’m just here to say that I too love spiders and I love this post.

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For me, I usually narrow it down by region and season.

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