Some interesting color variations in a local spider

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MarkSturtevant
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Location: Michigan, U.S.A.
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Some interesting color variations in a local spider

Post by MarkSturtevant »

A common spider in both woodlands and meadows around here is a species of nursery web spider, Pisaurina mira. The common name for these spiders has to do with how females care for their young. Females carry an egg sac slung under their body, and when the youngsters are about to hatch she places the egg sac on the top of a plant and creates a 'nursery' web around them. She guards them for a time after they hatch.

But to get to the point of this post, this species has some color variations, and I thought to show some of them here. First is a 'standard' form.
ImageNursery web spider (Pisaurina mira) by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

Next is a dark form. This female was guarding her nursery nearby and it was little scary to take this picture since they are very protective at the time and the spiders are kind of big.
ImageNursery spider by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

And here is a third color form. This is my favorite.
ImageNursery web spider (novel morph) by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr

Nursery web spiders are fast runners, and one can see that they are related to wolf spiders. One thing to note in closing is that they are strongly 'thigmotactic', which is just a fancy way of saying that they really want to have their feet on a substrate, so they don't want to jump. This is a reassuring when photographing them since I am (pretty) confident that they will want to stay on their plant and not want to jump on me.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

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