huttonia's Favourites

Just for interest, added cycad seeds being sorted . Nobody seems to know who brought them in or where they came from, but many of the seeds have similar holes, similarly empty. None of our cycads have cones now, so thinking this beastie came in with the seeds.

Orbweaver eating web after a man yelled, 'I am the destroyer of spiders' and confidently ran through the web destroying much of the work. Man was warned of presence of web before he did this. A child in the vicinity was saddened and left with his mother thinking the man ate the spider. I found the spider on a small clump of remaining web after the child left with his mother minutes later.

She was so cute I just had to photograph her :)

In photo 2, compare the epigynum to that of figure 22 in Brady (1964). Oxyopes salticus (see figure 93) would have an epigynum with a peculiar median projection, and O. scalaris wouldn't have the facial stripes that the other Ohio species have. O. scalaris (based on figure 98) would have a median projection similar to O. salticus, except broader. O. aglossus clearly doesn't have any median projection.

Brady, A. R. (1964). The lynx spiders of North America, north of Mexico (Araneae: Oxyopidae). Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 131: 429-518.