Wild BNE

I visited South Brisbane Cemetery recently, hoping to photograph nocturnal creepy-crawlies for a Halloween-themed blog post. And boy, did I find something creepy. I found a zombie!  Now I know what you might be thinking: “That man has watched too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and on that point, you are actually correct, but I swear that I did find a zombie, only I didn’t know it at the time. To me, it was just a spider. A spider with a small, white grub on its back. The spider belongs to the cobweb spider family Theridiidae, whose best known member in Australia is the red-back spider. This particular spider was pea-sized and had a messy web in the foliage of a weeping fig. I never figured out which species it is because learning about the grub became my focus, but if anyone reading this can enlighten me, please let me know. As for the grub, it’s the larval form of a wasp in the Ichneumonidae family, which are perhaps nature’s most famous parasitoids. * Within this family are a sma...

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...