Male Spiders: Thick-Jawed Orb Weaver, and Cobweb Spider
I found this moderately orange spider prowling around the wall near our porch light on June 15, 2015. His body was about 4 mm long.
Like a lot of the spiders I’ve been photographing lately, he has the enlarged pedipalps that mark him as a male.
I’ve got two spiders for you today, that I think are both the same species, but that were found at different times. The first was caught near our porch light on June 13, 2015, and looks to be a fairly substantial male spider (the body was about a quarter of an inch long).
I found this little spider hanging around the porch light on June 13, 2015. I’m not sure he was actually drawn to the light, though – he more likely was drawn by the other insects that were coming to the light (or maybe by the female spiders that were drawn by the insects that came to the light).
Well, since Halloween is coming, I guess it would be appropriate to keep going with the spiders for the next couple of weeks. This little black spider was in the kitchen sink on July 26, 2015. That’s a water drop on his back, at the “waist” between the cephalothorax and the abdomen, because he got a bit wet before I noticed him running around the sink drain. He’s not very big, his body is only maybe 4 mm long.
Male Spider with Brass-Colored Abdomen
I found this little spider (body length was only 3 or 4 millimeters) on the wall near our front door on June 11, 2015. From the enlarged pedipalps, I’m pretty sure it was a male.
His abdomen looks metallic, which is kind of unusual for a spider. The black-and-white pattern on his front legs is also fairly distinctive.
These beetles were all over the dogwood blossoms out back on June 8, 2015, so we brought a bunch of them back to the house for pictures.
At first, we thought that there were two different species – brown ones, and black ones. But then we noticed that a lot of the black ones were busy mating with the brown ones, and we realized that they were all one species and this was just a sexual dimorphism.
Sandy found this shiny green beetle in one of her raised-bed gardens on June 6, 2015. While it doesn’t look all that much like the big, brown scarab beetles that we normally call “June Beetles” around here, it does appear to be one of them, even though it is only about half an inch long.
I found this crawling on the wall near our front door on June 23, 2015. And while this is a species that I photographed before, that was way back in 2007, and the previous pictures are not too good. So I says to myself, I says, “Self, you need to re-photograph this one.” So here it is.
Sam found this interestingly-mined aspen leaf while we were walking in the woods on June 8, 2015.
This long, squiggly track is characteristic of the Common Aspen Leaf Miner, Phyllocnistis populiella. It started shortly after hatching as an egg at the small end of the trail:
On June 8, 2015, Sam and I were walking out back and found that the dogwood blossoms were covered with numerous beetles. Including these attractive gold-and-dark-green beetles with script-like markings on their wing covers.
