Terror for the Jumpers - _TNY_8641
The walls of my mother-in-law's garage is a surefire spot for me to find Attulus terebratus jumping spiders in the summer.
Here is someone else that was there to find jumping spiders - I believe this to be a female spider wasp known as Deuteragenia subintermedia.
These guys (or technically girls, I suppose) hunt and paralyze jumping spiders (Salticidae) and tube web spiders (Segestria) and then bury them as food for their offspring.
At first, this might sound cruel, but then you realise that the jumpers kill a lot of other bugs as well - are these really worse.
As so often in nature, there is another levelt to it all - here in the form of the cuckoo wasp Trichrysis cyanea which is known to parasitize on D. subintermedia and lay their own eggs in their egg chambers, killing the other wasp's egg/larvae and feed on it and the spider.
The one in my shot didn't find any spiders while I was watching and soon buzzed off somewhere else.
Terror for the Jumpers - _TNY_8641
The walls of my mother-in-law's garage is a surefire spot for me to find Attulus terebratus jumping spiders in the summer.
Here is someone else that was there to find jumping spiders - I believe this to be a female spider wasp known as Deuteragenia subintermedia.
These guys (or technically girls, I suppose) hunt and paralyze jumping spiders (Salticidae) and tube web spiders (Segestria) and then bury them as food for their offspring.
At first, this might sound cruel, but then you realise that the jumpers kill a lot of other bugs as well - are these really worse.
As so often in nature, there is another levelt to it all - here in the form of the cuckoo wasp Trichrysis cyanea which is known to parasitize on D. subintermedia and lay their own eggs in their egg chambers, killing the other wasp's egg/larvae and feed on it and the spider.
The one in my shot didn't find any spiders while I was watching and soon buzzed off somewhere else.