Spiderday is back! I was away for a little while, but am happy to bring you some arachnid stories pulled from the web over the last little while.

But first, do check out photos from Colin Hutton:

A tailless whip scorpion, by Colin Hutton (reproduced here with permission)

• Spider eye-spots? The back end of pirate spiders look like the front end of nursery web spiders. Huh? Some amazing natural history – this is my Read Of The Week.
• Spiders can ‘sail across the water’. Indeed, they are sailors, as well as aviators.
• Sad to hear about the passing of spider enthusiast Bob Thomson –here’s a lovely write-up about his amazing life, and his interest in arachnids.
• The Dwarf Spider ID gallery. A truly amazing resource.
• A researcher finds some incredible spiders from Ecuador.
• Wolf spiders can be super common and abundance, especially those in the genus Pardosa – here’s a nice post about these thin-legged Lycosids.
• Boom: here is a DNA barcode reference library for Canadian spiders. Interestingly, the authors suggest diversity of spiders in Canada may be 30-50% higher current estimates.
• I have just returned from a trip to the Yukon – we found these critters, again:

• File this under ‘cool things you never knew before’ – black widow spider silk was used to make gun sight cross hairs in WWII.
• Personalities? Social Spiders? Here’s the link for you. 
• A terrific overview of tube-web spiders (Family Segestriidae).
• In this paper, a novel mating plug mechanism is described (along with a new species of Salticidae described)
• You can take a summer course about spiders, in Nantucket. Looks great!
• An excellent write-up about some recent research about black widow spiders, in which “Male black widow spiders destroy large sections of the female’s web during courtship and wrap it up in their own silk“.
• Brilliant jumping spiders – a bit of natural history about Phidippus clarus.
• Why the heck are we finding so many scorpions and spiders in our fruit… and should we worry? Here’s a good take on the topic.
• We are often enamored by courtship of jumping spiders, but wolf spider courtship is pretty great too!