Long Jawed - NH 013

NH 013

Long Jawed Orb Weaver

Category: Arachnids

Family: Tetragnathae

It's Spider Saturday once again, and while I promised some of you that I would be posting the newest arachnid addition to the Sholesonian, the permanent display has yet to be finished so you'll have to wait a little bit longer (maybe next week but I can't be sure over the holiday weekend). So I have decided to post up one of my favorite spiders from the vault. This guy was collected on the Thurston Avenue Bridge, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA sometime in September after dusk. The bridge is literally crawling with thousands of these guys and other spiders and they are most prominently seen at nightfall.

What's cool about these Long-Jawed Orb Weavers is that you can actually see that their jaws are longer than other common orb weavers, but also they have a longer pair of legs in the front. You can clearly see both distinct characteristics in the photograph, and I think that it makes a great new addition to the museum. It isn't poisonous but does have a certain unnerving quality to it that makes it one of the finer pieces. It belongs to the family Tetragnathae, and I'm pretty sure I've broken it down into the Tetragnatha genus. Other than that I don't think I can get species at the moment, a lot of them look similar.