Grand Case Spiders and Everything Else
Continuing with the next selections from a couple recent walks around Grand Case and its ponds, here we have spiders and everything else.
The spiders alone are pretty fantastic. Near the ponds, the family Tetragnathidae is most visible, and they probably eat a lot of midges and other insects with aquatic larvae. In this family are the orchard spiders of the genus Leucauge and the long-jawed spiders, I think mostly from the genus Tetragnatha. In the Leucauge webs, there are also a number of different spiders from the genus Argyrodes, which are kleptoparasites which live in the webs of larger spiders and steal food from them. It’s possible this is at least a little bit symbiotic, in that they may clean the webs of prey that is too small to be of real interest to the web owner.
A bit away from the edge of the pond, I found another of what I think is Eriophora ravilla, a large, robust orb-weaver that I usually see hiding in the leaves at one corner of its web. This one has a strikingly different color than the last one I saw.
Finally, beneath some cardboard boxes, I found a number of small jumping spiders, a spitting spider and the wolf spider that was previously thought to be endemic to Saint Vincent. In all, more than a dozen species seen in just a few hours around town.
And of, course, there were lots of other things to see, including insects and lizards.
