spider with fly
Sandy found this spider on the spout of her watering can in the garden on May 23, 2019. He has caught a succulent little fly.
He certainly overwintered as an adult or near adult, since this was pretty early in the season. And I say “he” because his pedipalps, which are holding on to the fly, look enlarged at the ends.
This looks like the same kind of spider as the one I found crawling on a Christmas card in December 2015, except that one was either immature or female.
I’m still not sure exactly what kind of spider this is. I thought the one on the christmas card might have been one of the sac spiders or ghost spiders, but now I don’t think that’s right. A lot of those have the right color, but don’t have quite the right arrangement of eyes along with the right cephalothorax shape. The body shape is actually a better match for some of the Running Crab Spiders in the genus Philodromus, and it specifically looks rather a lot like this specimen. Although, no one has identified that one down to the species level, either.
I can’t see the fly well enough to identify, although I don’t think it is one of the ones that resembles houseflies. At any rate the spider is quite small (body maybe a quarter of an inch long), so the fly obviously isn’t very big either. There’s just something about that fly’s abdomen that makes me think it might be one of the biting flies, in which case, “Thanks, Spider!”
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