Introduction to Spiders

Last Friday I ran a course for the first time. An Introduction to Spiders at Iping Common. This fantastic reserve is Sussex's best site for spiders, with 204 species recorded there and a quarter of these having conservation status, it's one of the best places to see spiders in Sussex (along with Rye Harbour).

The aim was to show how much can be done in the field and also how much needs to be done at the microscope. The very first spider we recorded on the first Gorse we beat was the nationally scarce Araneus angulatus! All in all we recorded 21 species. Only one of these was identified at the microscope. Tibellus oblongus. Despite taking several very spotty Tibellus, we didn't manage to add Tibellus maritimus to the site list, a useful lesson in how some ID features are only a guide with spdiers. In fact, it's getting really hard to add a new spider to this site! Here are the spiders we saw with the year they were last recorded and their conservation status.

Species	Cons status	Last record
Aelurillus v-insignitus	NS	2017
Agalenatea redii		2017
Agelena labyrinthica		2017
Anyphaena accentuata		2012
Araneus angulatus	NS	2012
Araneus diadematus		2017
Araneus quadratus		2017
Arctosa perita		2017
Cercidia prominens	NS	2017
Euophrys frontalis		2007
Evarcha arcuata	NS	2017
Evarcha falcata		2017
Hypsosinga sanguinea	NS	2018
Mangora acalypha		2017
Philodromus histrio	NS	2017
Pisaura mirabilis		2017
Salticus cingulatus		2012
Simitidion simile		2017
Thomisus onustus	NS	2017
Tibellus oblongus		2012
Xerolycosa nemoralis	NS	2018

That's a whopping 38% of spiders with conservation status! Stars of the show included the jumping spiders and of course Thomisus onustus shown above. We found one adult male and two immature females. It's the male featured in the image above and below. I think it looks like cooling lava against the black heath.

This is the female (although this image was taken some years ago of an adult - wow it was over eight years ago now).

Well done everyone who attended and help find the spiders, if any course attendees have any photos they would like to share on this post from the day I will gladly do so. It was a great day. But it didn't end with the spiders. We had two species new to Iping Common. Both bugs, being Leptopterna ferrugata and Aradus cinnamomeus. The rare beetle Cryptocephalus biggutatus also showed up in the sweep net.