Sunday, May 18, 2014

A Nursery Web Spider, Pisaurina dubia

Spiders can be very confusing to identify. There is a great deal of “convergent evolution” in appearance and behavior between very different genera, even families. I found myself momentarily wrong earlier this month when a lanky, striped spider wandered onto the sheet of our blacklight setup in a suburban neighborhood in Manhattan, Kansas. It was the first time I had seen a specimen of Pisaurina dubia, a type of nursery web spider in the family Pisauridae.

Note pale second leg on right, regenerated after being lost previously

Most members of the Pisauridae are large or very large when mature, but those in the genus Pisaurina spend the winter as sub-adults, so they are slightly smaller in size in the spring. Consequently, I mistook this one for another kind of spider. This spider measured only about 12-15 millimeters in body length, so my initial identification was one of the slender crab spiders in the genus Tibellus, family Philodromidae.

Tibellus slender crab spider

The “habitat” where the spider was prowling was a lawn, which is also rather atypical for nursery web spiders that favor much taller grass at the least, and usually shrubs and trees, too. Mature females construct “nursery webs” amid foliage at least a few inches off the ground where they suspend their egg sac just prior to the emergence of the spiderlings. Mom guards the youngsters until they molt again and disperse.

Turns out that a lawn is not foreign territory after all, at least not for this species. P. dubia also occurs in the litter and understory of woods, along forest edges, in barns on hay bales (well, one specimen anyway), and on the exterior of homes, sometimes straying indoors (Guarisco, 1994). This spider has even been found living in pitcher plants, climbing around on Spanish moss (actually a type of bromeliad), in sugarcane fields, and low vegetation in wetlands in the southeast U.S.

© Jon P. Inghram via Bugguide.net

To my knowledge, this species has no common name, but I might suggest it be called the “Horned Nursery Web Spider” or “Tufted Nursery Web Spider.” One of the distinguishing features of Pisaurina dubia appears to be a central tuft of hair that usually projects from between the eyes at the front of the cephalothorax like a tiny horn (see image above).

This species ranges across the southern two-thirds of the eastern U.S. from New Jersey to Florida, and east to eastern Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Sources: Balaban, John and Jane, et al. 2005. “Species Pisaurina dubia,” Bugguide.net
Carico, James E. 1972. “The Nearctic Spider Genus Pisaurina (Pisauridae),” Psyche 79: 295-310.
Guarisco, Hank. 1994. “Natural History Observations of the Spider, Pisaurina dubia (Hentz) (Araneae: Pisauridae) in Northeastern Kansas,” Trans. Kans. Acad. Sci. 97(3-4): 149-152

6 comments:

  1. They were my favorite group to watch in the forest at home in Germany. Those were large, velvety and often nicely fawn colored ... and more willing than others to sit still for a photo ...

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  2. Awesome blog! I made the same mistake of finding a small one of these back in March and mistook it for a crab spider. I like "Tufted Nursery Web".

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  3. Well i just found one in my tailer in British Columbia

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  4. Replies
    1. Nearly all spiders are *venomous*, but unless you have a compromised or hypersensitive immune system, hardly any are dangerous. The widows (Latrodectus spp.) and brown spiders (Loxosceles spp.) are the only spiders in North America that can be dangerous to the average healthy person.

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  5. This spider is in my room
    How too whe take hom out

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