#spiderskull142

[onenicebugperday]

A thing I've wondered, why do some spiders have a funky lil zigzag line in their web? There's this whole web, almost not visible, and then this very visible and chonky zigzag thing at one spot for some reason. Sorry if this wasn't specific enough, I've never been good at describing things. Hope you have a nice day though!

It's called a stabilimentum, and they come in lots of different shapes depending on the species of spider! "Zigzag spider" or "zipper spider" are common names for the yellow garden spider, Argiope aurantia, because of their stabilimenta, so most people are familiar with them, I think! The purpose is still debated, though. I've read a bunch of papers about it over the years, and I don't know what the leading theory is anymore, but past theories have included web stabilization (found to be unlikely), camouflaging the spider itself, which normally sits in the middle of the web and thus in the stabilimentum, making the web visible to animals like birds who might otherwise destroy it (seems counter-productive? why would you want a predator to know where you are?), and finally prey attraction, possibly by reflecting UV light, which insects are attracted to.

So...I don't have a good answer for you, and apparently neither do arachnologists :P

[countryhumanblues]

Hello! I just noticed that you've been drawing your necks far too long, you could shorten them too stop at where indos first neck marking ends or a little tiny bit lower than that if you want to! I hope this helps and tiny bit, your art is really great though and just keep on going because I know it's only getting better even if it's small things that you can't see it will always get better! Ok, goodbye!

Heya! I’ve kinda noticed that too, considering this isn’t the first time someone’s mentioned the neck length issue. so thanks for bringin it up! I’ll be sure to work on it some more! 👌

[onenicebugperday]

Oh a thing I've been wondering, how are you able to identify bugs so well? Is there a specific way you Google to find out what the bug is, or do you just often already know? Hope it wasn't rude of me to ask this by the way, it's just been a thing I've been curious about

Not rude at all! Google is not very useful for IDing bugs to be honest since so many results come up that are just entirely wrong. Like not even close lol. It's sometimes helpful if you don't even know what type of bug you're looking at to google a description and look at photos to try to find a match, but otherwise, I wouldn't rely on it.

I do know a lot of IDs offhand just because I've been doing this for so long, but I still have to look up some, especially the Latin names. Can't remember all of those for sure. The iNaturalist website (not the app) is great for finding bugs you don't recognize, though. You can sort by taxon and location and even life stage then look at photos to compare. Bugguide is also a great website when iNat fails, although bugguide's search options are incredibly lacking. Same with spiderID.