Saturday, August 18, 2012

Exciting news on the spider front!

James forwarded me a link yesterday with some exciting spider news. Well, it's exciting if you love spiders like I do. Here's the scoop..."New family of spiders found in Oregon cave," reports Jeff Barnard with the Associated Press:

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP)—Amateur cave explorers have found a new family of spiders in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, and scientists have dubbed it Trogloraptor— Latin for cave robber—for their fearsome front claws.

The spelunkers sent specimens to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which has the West Coast's largest collection of spiders. Entomologists there say the spider—reddish brown and the size of a half dollar—evolved so distinctly that it requires its own taxonomic family—the first new spider family found in North America since the 1870s.

Click the link above and read the rest of Barnard's article!

4 comments:

sandy lawrence said...

That is exciting! I like spiders, too, the jumping spiders - especially the ones with the green eyes - and the golden orb spider being my favorites. And who doesn't like the tiny pastel flower spiders? But then I like bats and crows, too, so I'm always in fashion once a year - Halloween. ;-)

Sheryl Smith-Rodgers said...

ALL of nature is wonderful, fascinating and AMAZING! Those jumping spider you like...are they black and white, fuzzy too? Those are Phidipus audux, the bold jumping spider. My favorite too! And I think you're talking about a species of crab spiders, which like to lurk on flowers. They are cool, too. So are bats and crows! I just heard a crow fly over our neighborhood awhile ago!

sandy lawrence said...

Yes, it's the bold jumping spider. For some reason I just love looking at their eyes up close. They look as if they are as curious about me as I them.
Yesterday was a red letter day here. Someone found a junvenile Eastern Blackneck Garter snake on his front porch and gave it to me. I released it down by the creek on my property at a shallow point that had lots of minnows. There was mud, dry spots w/rocks, water, food and native grass cover for him (or her), so I think he will be happy. What a gorgeous, brightly colored snake! Orange stripe, yellow stripes, velvet black neck and very unusual looking head for a garter snake, seems to me.

Sheryl Smith-Rodgers said...

Hope you got some photos of the snake, Sandy! And jumping spiders have the best eyesight of all the spider families. They ARE curious about nearly everything! They're the coolest spiders of all, I think.

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