Leafy hideaways: night time is the right time to see these shy tree spiders.

Near the edge of bushland in Coopers Plains one night last week, I found a lovely, shy pale-backed orbweaver (Araneus albidus) in a bloodwood tree. It had a beautifully constructed retreat inside the curled-up but living leaves of the tree. Adjacent to this dwelling was its prey capture web, a small, well-made orb amongst the foliage. I imagine that when the bloodwood flowers profusely (and it’s always profusely when it comes to bloodwoods), the web must offer a huge bounty of nectivorous insects as food.

To my eye, this spider is virtually indistinguishable from another orb-weaver, the leaf-curling Araneus dimidiatus. That spider, however, only ever seems to use a dead leaf as its retreat, unlike A. albidus. Reading various resources about these two spiders confirms this observation, and it appears to be the easiest way to tell them apart.

On the finer branch ends of many shrubs in the bushland were messy webs with tiny spiders in them. They all had a similar hunched shape, and when I found a slightly bigger example of one of them (around 5 or 6mm), I took a decent enough photo. Identifying it later in my field guide, I found it to be a spider from the Uloboridae family, which are unusual in the spider world for being totally venomless.

The species is likely to be Philoponella variabilis, a common but overlooked spider throughout Brisbane according to Robert Whyte’s website.