This is the second post by Honour’s undergraduate student Kamil Chatila-Amos – he has been busy working on identifying LOTS of spiders from bogs of northern Quebec. His first blog post introduced his project: this one gives a glimpse into the data…

My project is focused on studying spiders from bogs in the James Bay region of Quebec. Five bogs along the James Bay highway were sampled with pan traps every week for four sampling periods. In the full project I’m looking at how abiotic factors (i.e. pH, water table, latitude, etc.) and the plant community affect the arachnid community composition. For now, let’s look at how the spider families are distributed in these sites:

The first thing that might strike you if you are familiar with the area and its spider fauna is that in 4 out of 5 sites, neither Lycosidae (wolf spiders) nor Linyphiidae (subfamily Erigoninae) are the most abundant family. Previous studies in similar habitats tend to find a much greater proportion of those two taxa (Aitchison-Benell 1994; Koponen 1994). All sites except the first have more Gnaphosids than Lycosids. However, the breakdown within families is very different. Whereas the Lycosids are represented by 19 species, there were only five species within the Gnaphosidae. Even more impressive is that one Gnaphosidae species represents 99% of the family. Indeed, Gnaphosa microps alone represents a fifth of all arachnids I collected.

I’ve come to like Gnaphosa microps a lot! The family Gnaphosidae is pretty easy to identify thanks to their long and separate spinnerets, colour and eye placement. Even the palps, which are unique to species, are fairly easy to recognize. It ranges in size from 5.4 – 7.1 millimeters which is a large enough size so it isn’t a hassle to manipulate.

Gnaphosa microps, seen from above. Photo from the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario through Barcode of Life Data Systems

Gnaphosa microps is by no means a star of the spider world but we still know a fair bit about it. It is a holarctic species meaning it can be found in almost all of the northern hemisphere, even as far as Turkey (Seyyar et al. 2008). It is usually found in in open boreal forests, alluvial meadows and bogs. A nocturnal species, it spends its days in a silk retreat under moss or debris and hunts at night by catching prey on the ground (Ovcharenko et al. 1992). Even though sampling has been done very near my sites and in similar habitats (Koponen 1994) I still haven’t found another study where it was the most abundant species.

Another interesting tidbit about this species is just how skewed their sex ratio is. According to my data, males outnumber females almost 10 to 1! Now this does not mean it is always like this in nature, this ratio can be explained by sexually dimorphic behavior. This means that the males would behave differently than females in a way that would increase their odds of falling into traps. Indeed, according to Vollrath and Parker (1992) spider species with sedentary females have smaller, roving males. And like their model predicts the G. microps males are a bit smaller than the females.

Sex ratio of Gnaphosa microps, collected in bogs

So what’s next? I still need to retrieve the COI barcode of all my species and that will be possible thanks to the University of Guelph’s Biodiversity Institute of Ontario. This is to make sure my identifications are indeed correct. As a first time spider taxonomist it’s great to be able to confirm my work in a way that still is not widely available. Today I received the plate in which I’ll load the spider tissue and I am amazed at how tiny it is. I guess they just need 2mm per spider but I still expected it to be much more impressive. Hopefully I don’t get any nasty surprises once the DNA data comes back, although some of those tiny Linyphiids did give me a pretty bad headache…

References:

Aitchison-Benell CW. 1994. Bog Arachnids (Araneae, Opiliones) From Manitoba Taiga. Mem. Entomol. Soc. Canada 126:21–31.

Koponen S. 1994. Ground-living spiders, opilionids, and pseudoscorpions of peatlands in Quebec. Mem. Entomol. Soc. Canada 126:41–60.

Ovcharenko VI, Platnick NI, Sung T. 1992. A review of the North Asian ground spiders of the genus Gnaphosa (Araneae, Gnaphosidae). Bull. Am. Museum Nat. Hist. 212:1-92

Seyyar O, Ayyıldız N, Topçu A. 2008. Updated Checklist of Ground Spiders (Araneae: Gnaphosidae) of Turkey, with Zoogeographical and Faunistic Remarks. Entomol. News 119:509–520.

Vollrath F, Parker GA. 1992. Sexual dimorphism and distorted sex ratios in spiders. Nature 360:156–159.