One evening last week, I stepped out my back door and noticed the leaves of a wild grape vine. I stopped to take a closer look at various galls and damage to the leaves, where insects had been feeding.
I turned over one leaf and noticed a tiny spider, Spintharus flavidus.
Hello!
Their face-like abdomens are only about the size of a SESAME SEED, hence a bit of blur in the image. These beauties have the ability to adjust the color of their silk to enhance the effectiveness of their webs. Given their diminutive size, it's a miracle I even saw them.
The view out my window, some might assume, is a simple still life. But, no, it is a busy thriving complicated community, a place of life-and-death dramas and colorful characters, like Spintharus flavidus.
Spintharus are typically found in leaf litter or the undersides of leaves in low vegetation where they construct small and difficult to observe webs. These webs are simplified ‘H-webs’ (Levi, 1963a; Agnarsson, 2004) where the spider is in the middle facing down towards the gluey droplets at the base of the web. Agnarsson et al., 2018. From there, Spintharus monitors a pair of lines, and awaits potential prey's blundering into and becoming trapped by them.
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