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Showing posts from October, 2021

The night I saw a zombie in South Brisbane Cemetery

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 small g