Ordinary ant thief
| Ordinary ant thief | ||||||||||||
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Common ant thief ( Callilepis nocturna ), female |
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Callilepis nocturna | ||||||||||||
| ( Linnaeus , 1758) |
The common ant thief or the flat-bellied ant-eating spider ( Callilepis nocturna ) is a spider from the flat-bellied spider family (Gnaphosidae). Distinctive features of the Palearctic species are their appearance and their way of life: They feed exclusively on ants .
features
Females of the common ant thief reach a body length of four to six millimeters, males are four to five millimeters long. The species has a black-brown to completely black basic color.
Silver or shiny gold hair gives the common ant thief a striking pattern that takes up almost the entire prosoma with the dark brown sternum and, in the opisthosoma, consists of a cross band and four round spots behind it, two of which are slightly above the center and the other two almost on the front End of the opisthosoma. Especially with older specimens, the color can often be rubbed off, making the pattern indistinct.
The common ant thief has well-developed eyes. The front side eyes are larger than the front median eyes, while the rear median eyes are elongated and arranged transversely. The legs are light- or red-brown to brown in color, which turns out darker at the end of the legs.
Similar species
The common ant thief is particularly similar to the genus- related colored ant thief ( Callilepis schuszteri ) and can only be reliably distinguished from it by genital morphological features. In contrast to the common ant thief, the epigyne of the colored ant thief is not interrupted at the front, arched edge in the middle.
Occurrence
The common ant thief has a large distribution area , ranging from Europe to many parts of Asia , including the Caucasus , Russia (European to eastern part), Kazakhstan , China and Japan .
Habitats
Warm and open places such as dry grass , vineyards , sunny forest edges and also sunny areas of piles of stones come into question as habitats . In the Alps , the species occurs up to an altitude of almost 2000 meters. Together with the colorful ant thief, the common ant thief is one of the two types of ant thief ( Callilepis ) that also occur in Germany.
Threat and protection
In Germany the common ant thief occurs in large areas except in the north. He is listed in the Red List of Endangered Animals, Plants and Fungi in Germany as "not endangered ".
Way of life
The common ant thief is one of the diurnal flat-bellied spiders , contrary to what the scientific species name nocturna (German: nocturnal ) would suggest. He spends the night in a webbing sack that he puts under stones.
Hunting behavior and catch of prey
As with the colorful ant thief and other specialized species of the genus, the diet of the common ant thief consists entirely of ants . He hunts them without a net and actively seeks them out. If an ant is close at hand, the spider will jump on it and bite the base of a feeler. During the attack, it attaches a spider thread to the ant, preventing it from escaping. Then it backs away, and after about a minute the ant is paralyzed by the poison bite . A similar hunting strategy is used by many other flat-bellied spiders.
The common ant thief carries the paralyzed ant into a hiding place lined with a light web and sucks it out. He only hunts in the midday to the early afternoon (around 12 noon to 2 p.m.).
Reproduction
The mating season of the common ant thief is mostly limited to June. A male locates a female through her spun threads. It is believed that females willing to mate provide the threads with an attractant ( pheromone ), which evaporates again after a few minutes. Shortly after mating, the male dies.
Some time after mating, the female produces several circular egg cocoons up to seven millimeters in size , each containing up to six eggs. In contrast to other smooth-bellied spiders, the cocoons are not guarded by the female. Adult specimens of the common ant thief can be found from March to September.
Systematics
In 1758, Carl von Linné first described the common ant thief as Aranea nocturna ( all spiders were then assigned to the genus Aranea ). Niklas Westring established the genus Callilepis in 1874 and classified Filistata maculata in the genus that is still valid today, so that from then on the name Callilepis maculata was considered current. Władysław Kulczyński recognized in 1874 that it belonged to Callilepis and assigned it to this genus under the name Callilepis nocturna , which is still valid today .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g Heiko Bellmann: The cosmos spider guide. 2nd Edition. Kosmos, Stuttgart 2016, ISBN 978-3-440-14895-2 , p. 248.
- ↑ a b Description of the common ant thief on the website of natur-in-nrw.de ( Link ).
- ↑ a b c Description of the common ant thief on the website of the Naturschutzbund Germany in Bavaria ( Link ).
- ↑ a b The common ant thief in the World Spider Catalog ( Link ).
- ↑ Theo Blick et al. (2016): Red list and total species list of spiders (Arachnida: Araneae) in Germany . In: Nature Conservation and Biological Diversity 70 (4), pp. 383-510.
