We just moved to Michigan and these are all around the property (including the basement). Just want to know if it's something I need to be concerned about. Google lens is inconclusive, at least with my non-existent knowledge.
Since they are found in the same places as Scorpions, these always creep me out. Once I see what it is, I shoo it elsewhere. As long as they are handled gently they don't release that defensive stink. Scorpions here readily act defensive, these are much more relaxed. Their colouration is quite interesting.
Of particular interest is the extreme size discrepancy between male and female in this species. This was also one of the largest females I've ever seen!
I recently came across this lovely(?) crab spider on a birding excursion. The bird-dropping spiders of Phrynarachne are apparently not only visual but also olfactory mimics, for all intents and purposes attempting to fool both predators and prey. Apologies for the slightly subpar image quality; I didn't have my macro lens and had to improvise.
Found it on my son's hair after a 10min visit to our veggies garden. My guess is that it might be a tick but we are not in an area of lime disease and although it's an open, rather unkept, field the only mammals I see around are 2-3 stray(?) cats.
Here's another old picture from my vault. This is one of our Greenbottle blue tarantulas (Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens). We spent the day watching this little guy molt from start to finish and took pictures of the whole process. You can see in this picture that he is laid out on his back on his molting malt. At this stage he has split from the carapace lengthwise down the sides and is currently pulling his legs out of the molt. We had two at the time and wanted to breed them but they both turned out to males.
Here's a pic of my favorite little guy and one the only good pictures I've ever taken. Unfortunately he turned out to be a male so I didn't have him too long but he was a great tarantula to keep.
I have a large terrarium where I grow various types of moss. I keep springtails in there to handle any mold that pops up, but some creature (fungus gnat larvae?) was killing off the springtails. So I captured a jumping spider, thinking it would gobble up the fruit flies/larvae. The fungus gnats have disappeared, so it seems like the spider might have done the job, but now I'm worried about it getting hungry.
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MrPistachios
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