Orb Weaver (?) - Larinioides

Moved

… Lynette Elliott, 14 January, 2013 - 8:55am

Moved

… john and jane balaban, 3 August, 2009 - 10:26am

From Rod:

I never heard of this before. Could be right, if you don't count the
end-of-tibia band slopping over a bit onto the metatarsus (as it does
in my specimen pictured on crawford.tardigrade.net).

However, look at some images on your own site.
253695
would be cornutus by this character, looks more like patagiatus to me.

235930
This is quite obviously patagiatus and it *does* have the additional
band.

303646
This one looks more like cornutus, and it matches the theory.

234276
But this one also looks like cornutus, and does *not* match.

221480
This one looks like scolopetarius, but has "cornutus" banding.

223300
This sclopetarius does have the extra band

33969
This one doesn't

76537
This one doesn't, and is clearly patagiatus not sclopetarius.

So I'd suggest this character may not be universally valid. However,
cornutus is so rare in Washington that I have few opportunities to
field check it.

My general impression is: sclopetarius has few or no warm tints on the
body but generally appears gray, varying from pale cream to almost
black, and has the brightest white hair patch on the carapace..
patagiatus generally has reddish carapace and legs and often
abdomen as well, with a slightly less conspicuous hair patch. cornutus
seems to have carapace and legs brown rather than red, the abdomen is
a bit less monochrome than sclopetarius but more so than patagiatus,
and the white carapace hair is least conspicuous of the 3.

However, I wouldn't swear to any of this without examining genitalia!

BTW, the spider on the page you reference below is juvenile, not adult
female, as shown by the ventral view. When all's said and done, it
*does* look like a cornutus even by my criteria.

… Lynette Elliott, 3 August, 2009 - 9:08am

Thanks

Thanks Rod, and Lynette, for that great information! :)

… John Sloan, 5 August, 2009 - 11:43am

Moved

Moved from Spiders.

… john and jane balaban, 2 August, 2009 - 6:41pm

L. cornutus field marks

We recently had an interesting discussion in the Nearctic forum about identifying L. cornutus. Kevin Pheiffer share a tip he got from a friend that L. cornutus can easily be distinguished from other Larinioides species by the number of dark bands on the last two segmanets of Leg IV. Larionioides cornutus has only two bands, while the other species in the genus all have 3 bands.

Here's a link to that thread:

http://forum.canadianarachnology.org/viewtopic.php?t=646

Anyway, it was very interesting and since then I've found that it seems to be consistent with pictures of properly ID'd Larionoides species. Maybe Lynette might want to run this by Rod Crawford for confirmation?

Anyway, if we go by that rule, the spider here would be L. cornutus.

(Assuming that this spider is in the genus Larinioides, that is.)

… John Sloan, 2 August, 2009 - 11:23pm

Orb weaver - Furrow Spider

How about something in the genus Larinioides?.

… Lynette Elliott, 28 June, 2009 - 10:35am