Feather foot spiders

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Feather foot spiders
Uloborus plumipes

Uloborus plumipes

Systematics
Class : Arachnids (arachnida)
Order : Spiders (Araneae)
Subordination : Real spiders (Araneomorphae)
Partial order : Entelegynae
Family : Ruffled web spiders (Uloboridae)
Genre : Feather foot spiders
Scientific name
Uloborus
Latreille , 1806

The feather foot spiders ( Uloborus ) a genus from the family of the curling wheel web spiders (Uloboridae) and comprise 76 species . (As of July 2016)

They are mainly distributed in the tropics and subtropics and only occur in North America and Europe with a few species in the temperate zones .

description

The chelicerae of the cribellate feather foot spiders are moderately robust, but they lack venom glands - a condition which is almost unknown in other spiders and which requires that the spiral of the orb web and the chelicerae alone are sufficient to kill the prey. The long front pair of legs is often curved. In many species, the legs are provided with tufts of feathery hair. The abdomen is often studded with humps and decorated with brush-like tufts of hair, often pale white, speckled, striped or monochrome black color variants. The eight individual eyes are small; Feather foot spiders essentially have to rely on their other senses.

Way of life

The feather-foot spiders weave their relatively small nets with a diameter of 10 to 18 centimeters in damp, shady places near the ground - on small shrubs and in the undergrowth on dead branches, in hollowed-out tree stumps or on rocks. The horizontally arranged wheel nets, which are always similar, consist of ground threads, radii, a dry auxiliary spiral (scaffolding threads) and the concentric catch spiral made of catch threads. They are built on the same principle as the mostly vertical webs of orb web spiders , without being related to them. They are composed of the same elements as the orb nets of the orb web spiders: basic threads, radii, dry auxiliary spiral (framework) and the concentric catch spiral. In addition to the different prey spectrum due to the orientation, the catch threads also differ significantly: While most orb web spiders are ecribellate spiders and produce threads with droplets of glue, the catch threads of feather foot spiders are made of catch wool . Often, however, the network is made very asymmetrical, especially during the breeding season.

species

The World Spider Catalog currently lists 76 species with 8 subspecies for feather foot spiders. (As of July 2016)

Web links

Commons : Feather foot spiders ( Uloborus )  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Uloborus in the World Spider Catalog

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Natural History Museum of the Burgergemeinde Bern: World Spider Catalog Version 17.0 - Uloborus . Retrieved July 14, 2016.