I recently saw the large and rather fantastic tropical orb weaver Eriophora ravilla hiding in some leaves on the side of a trail. As you can see below, it’s a very cool find. At the same time, any new discovery has the potential to open up a can of worms. First, it was a bit tricky to identify this spider because it comes in a variety of colors, so more than half of the photos of this species that I found online don’t look too much like it. Second, the male is smaller and looks considerably different, sometimes much like a spider from the Eustala genus, which is making me wonder if some spiders I had previously assumed were Eustala are in fact the males of this species.

As usual, there are many mysteries and few easy answers.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Explorations, Les Fruits sur la Terre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.