Keeping the wolves from your door

The current global situation has meant that I have much more time to cruise around photographing critters, and even more time to lie in wait for them. During a recent burst of gardening I found a hole in the ground and decided to wait and see what if anything appeared out of it (any excuse to laze away the day). Once the sun hit the entrance it wasn’t long before the resident appeared, a Wolf Spider. It took a further week of watching before I could get a shot of the whole spider outside of its burrow (see below) – stay-at-home protocols obviously also apply to spiders.

Wolf Spiders are one of the larger spiders in the district. They can be identified by their characteristic eye configuration (see previous blog) consisting of a bottom row of four small eyes with a top row of two large eyes facing forward and two smaller eyes facing backward. As previously mentioned they are ambush hunters rapidly chasing down prey along the ground from the burrows and cracks in the ground in which they live. And they are common. A walk at night in the bush with a torch will reveal a myriad of points of light reflected from the back of their eyes. Even divided by eight, it represents a lot of spiders.

A refugee from our recent burn-off

For those arachnophobes among us it may be hard to prevent these spiders getting close. The female spider carries the egg sac, and later the spiderlings, around on her abdomen. When the spiderlings are ready they send up strands of silk and disperse on the wind, often traveling large distances. A frightening thought? Think of them as an army of pest exterminators.