A Field Guide to the North Side of Old Mill Hill, Atlantic Mine, MI
Posts tagged ‘male’
This is a species of spider that has successfully colonized the dark corners of our house: so far S_ found me three specimens to photograph in December and January (two females and a male). I could tell that one of them was male because he had enormously swollen pedipalps, which I understand means he was ready to mate. He was within a few inches of one of the females, so we suspect that he was courting her when he was caught.
This crab spider was on the kitchen counter on July 5[1], strolling along just as bold as you please.
It appears to be a male goldenrod crab spider, Misumena vatia.
This time, we have several different individuals of a single species. First, in April, we started occasionally seeing worker ants in and around the house, like this one:
This is pretty clearly a black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus. As ants go, these are pretty big, about 8 mm long. It is possible to get them to bite, say, the edge of your fingernail, but they don’t so much hurt as just hang on. Anyway, after seeing these for a while, this next one showed up on the kitchen floor, so I refrigerated her for photography:
Well, once again, it’s Tick Time. They hang out on tall objects (mostly dead weed stems and the sides of buildings) with their little front legs outstreched, and grab on when someone brushes past unsuspectingly. They don’t bite right away, so we usually find them when they are still crawling around looking for a place to latch on (at this time of year, every little tickle and itch becomes suspect). The ones we have around here are good old Dermacentor variabilis, which some people call a “dog tick” and others call a “wood tick”, while just about everybody calls it an “eeewwww” when they find it crawling up their leg.
