Tiny White Cobweb Weaver Spider
When I brought home the Furrow Spider in the previous post, I just picked the flower head it was sitting on and brought it home. And upon getting home, I found that there was another spider hiding in the flower head. This one was so tiny as to be difficult to see with the naked eye. But upon looking at it at high magnification with my camera, it turns out to be one that we’ve seen before, and in fact I have photographed both bigger and smaller members of this species more than once before.
It looks to be another Enoplognatha ovata. We apparently have just the “lineata” color morph, which has rows of black dots running down the sides of the abdomen, rather than the red stripes that the “redivita” and “ovata” color morphs have.
I did get a particularly clear shot of the eyes, so you can see the eye pattern clearly. There are two eyes in front, a pair of eyes that have a reflective tapetum on top of the head, and on the sides there are two kind of egg-shaped eyes. The ancestral spider likely had eight eyes instead of six, and the two eyes on the side have their odd shape because they are the result of merging multiple eyes into a single one.
And yes, the Wikipedia page still says it is “notably found in Lithuania”, without explaining what is so notable about being found in Lithuania. They at least have a reference to the statement, though. It looks like some Wikipedia editor got hold of a copy of “The checklist of Lithuanian spiders (Arachnida: Araneae)[1]”, and went through all the species in it adding the note “notably found in Lithuania” to their Wikipedia pages. I just checked, one of the first spiders listed in the checklist is Crustulina_guttata, and practically the only thing the Wikipedia page says about it is that it is “notably found in Lithuania”.
[1] Marija Biteniekytė and Vygandas Rėlys, Biologija, 2011, Vol. 57, No. 4, pages 148–158, doi:10.6001/biologija.v57i4.1926
“Notably, found in Michigan”.
I’m just amplifying that phrasing for anyone looking for Michigan spiders. 🙂