Whoop! Three cheers for SPIDERDAY (or would it be more apt to say “eight cheers”?. All the arachnid links from the past week, in one place.

Meet your dock spiders. Photo by Sean McCann.

• My Read Of The Week was an easy one – this post on Spider Assassins (Family Archaeidae) contains incredible photos and natural history.
• Good news: the hobo spider is no longer on the ‘venomous animals’ list from the CDC. It’s about time!
• Spiders – a guide for first year students. Say calm, folks, stay calm.
• A crab spider eats a hoverfly. A wasp comes along. See what happens… 
• Here is a well-done illustrated guide to nine common spider species (and webs) occuring in households in the UK.
• Spiders on a plane! A roaming tarantula plays havoc with a Delta flight.
• Meet Singapore’s very own spider ambassador.
• In my own home, this week, Shelob met some hobbits (and Gollum too)
• Do you ever freak out when running into a spider web? Here’s a fun little conversation on the topic:

• On the more serious side, the Heartland virus (carried by ticks) may occur across the eastern USA. 
• Have a tick and need to remove it? Here’s some info for you. 
• Lyme disease update: Ticks carrying the lyme bacterium have been found in parks in south London (UK).
• Ticks get a bad name. On the lighter side of Ticks, there’s the comic-book series to consider…?
• An older finding on fossil Opiliones (Harvestmen) with a second set of eyes.
• There is often a lot of confusion around the common name “Daddy-long-legs” (in the Arachnid sense, this refers to Opiliones [Harvestmen] or sometimes cellar-spiders). Here’s an image that should help:

• Um, but it should be ‘Harvestperson’ not ‘Harvestmen’.

Here is the latest edition of SPIDERDAY! A perfect spot to check out the best ‘web’ links related to Arachnids. It’s sure to catch you…

From Alex Wild, a lovely amblypygid. Like that image? Here are more of his arachnid photos.

• The ‘parasite of the day’ blog featured wonderful natural history about  parasitoids of web-building spiders, and the parasitized spiders sometimes end up changing how they build their webs. My Read Of The Week
• On the biology and natural history of ant-like spiders in the genus Castianeira
• Brown recluse spider venom: how it works.
• Here is a fascinating paper about what it means to be a ‘specialized’ predator. In this case, the questions focus on blood-feeding jumping spiders. (um, not exactly – how about jumping spiders that show preferences for feeding on blood-fed mosquitoes)
• “American spiders and their spinningwork“. A classic from McCook, from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Widow spiders? They can get around… Here, reported from Tahiti (and some other islands) for the first time.
• Many toy companies have some troubles figuring out where to put legs on spiders. Here’s my drawing to help them out:

• An air quality monitoring station had a guest, and the arachnid messed the readings up. “A spider did it!”
• Taxonomy FTW… eight new Mygalomorph species are described.
• Spiders and the big screen… Predatoroonops – a genus of goblin spiders, all named in honour of characters from the movie Predator. 
• Wonderful research on black Widow web reduction… as a podcast. It’s worth a listen.
• Urban gardens, spiders and landscapes: a paper to check out.
• This is from a while ago, but worth a look again: some bizarre and beautiful “primitive” mites. Wow.
• In tick-related news, here is a simply excellent overview of the growing global battle against blood-sucking ticks.
• So, #Junkoff was a bit hit last week. Here’s my favourite: