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Photo#789534
Holly Cobweb - Theridion - female

Holly Cobweb - Theridion - Female
Franklinville, Gloucester County, New Jersey, USA
June 19, 2013
Size: Approx 2.5mm
Found on the underside of a holly leaf. Pretty spider except for the weird design on the lower posterior abdomen that looks like it was scribbled on with a Sharpie. Hoping that's a diagnostic feature. :)
Edit: Starting to think those scribbles might be parasitic worms.
Edit 2: Or a digestive tract full of black poo. :)
Edit 3: The black squiggles are tubuliform silk glands!

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Moved
Moved from Spiders.

Theridion w/black squiggles
That is really weird about the "sharpie squiggles!" I've never seen that before in a spider. Nematodes and other types of parasites do live in the abdomen of some spiders and eventually rupture out like something from Alien but, like Ken mentioned, these seem too symmetrical on each side, so I don't think that's what they are. I'm not even sure what part of their anatomy it could be either. I'll ask around, this is interesting! Oh, and I think this is a Theridion, but not sure of species without a microscope exam.
[edit] Oops, I meant to post this on the second image with all the other conversation.

 
Poo
I don't know if you missed it in the conversation but could it have been poo in the digestive tract? (Pushed close to the surface because she was very gravid.) They're not visible since she's made an egg sac and there was a poo like mass in her web this morning. I'll be checking to see if the squiggles return when she gains more weight. I've never kept a spider with a fertilized egg sac before.

 
Not poo, silk glands instead
I did see the poo comment, but I didn't want to say anything for certain about that until I heard from more people first. Spider poo comes out in liquid form, though sometimes it has tiny little black specks in it, so I was sure that the dried-looking mass in the web was not poo, but I wasn't sure if the squiggles really were the liquid poo being visible in the malpighian tubules or something. But... I got an answer!

The squiggles are actually the tubuliform silk glands! Apparently, in mature females they look that way, and it's common that the glands are pigmented. But it's not the liquid silk itself that is colored, it's just the actual gland. So far three people all agreed that's what they are: Dr. Joel Harp (Vanderbilt Univ.), Dr. Cheryl Hayashi (UC Riverside), and Dr. Geoff Oxford (Univ. of York). I think we have a winner!

I've never seen them before in any females I've kept, so maybe it just depends on how compressed against the surface of the abdomen they are, and how see-through the cuticle is. Dr. Oxford said he has seen them like this in his studies on Theridion grallator. That's a relatively see-through species, so that must be why.
I'm glad you shared these, I definitely learned something new! =D

...
Conversation on second image.

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