~ a fresh infestation

Part of the advantage of having a jungle for a garden is the occasional unexpected appearance of new flora and fauna.

In recent times, there’s been unusual activity in the natural world of Mt Waverley: nightmarish earwig infestations, the rise of the native cockroaches, an invasion of revolting black caterpillars which I have been unable to identify - and now a brand new spider.

I’ll leave moot the issue of climate change, though to my mind it is certainly in play.

Like any house in this region, we have our resident daddy long legs and huntsmen, but over the last month in various rooms we have noticed, in corners, clinging to walls, a spider that looks exactly like this:



I don’t have a good enough lens to capture something as small as a spider, so I had to borrow the image.

My photo looks like this:



As you will notice, there are now two of the spiders. They are handsome-looking things, clean, having a kind of design affiliation with the stick insect.

The species is Deinopsis subrufa, the net casting spider, named after its distinctive means of snaring prey. It waits with a unique rectangular net grasped in its four front legs. When potential prey passes – either arachnoid or insectile – it casts the net to effect capture; its victims tangling themselves in the non-sticky silk or cribellate. I haven’t seen this happen, of course, but could these spiders have been feasting on the local daddy long legs, moving from room to room, methodically clearing out our age old co-inhabitants…?

These individuals are male. I have not seen any females, which seem to be almost orange in appearance…

I have not found any mention of these spiders colonising the inside of houses. Have they been forced inside, I wonder, or is this an isolated occurrence? Whatever the case, who could be anything but proud to share his domicile with such a charismatic lifeform?