Spider ID help

St. Leibowitz

Hi,

Photographed outdoors on a compost bin in Dublin city yesterday. Anybody able to assist with an ID ? Body length approx 7mm.


Thanks,

Andy.

Sorry, photos didn't attach.

St. Leibowitz

F.R.

Looks like a comb-footed spider

http://www.uksafari.com/combfooted.htm

Very nice pics

St. Leibowitz

Thank you, looks like your ID is correct. I have never seen one of these before, and I spend alot of time rooting around for spiders and bugs to photograph.

Checked on some other websites and the colour and patterning looks to be very variable for this family. I spent a some time trying to ID her from books and the web. How did you do the ID ? Did you know the species, or did you do lookups and comparisons ??

Photo was taken with a Canon 50d with a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro lens and a Canon MT-24EX flash. The lens she's sitting on in the middle picture is a MP-E 65, but I didn't get to use that.

Thanks again.

F.R.

I didn't know the species name but I was looking for a spider id recently and came across pictures of yours at the time so i just had to check my history.

Esel

OP - how do you know it's female? Is it like a car?

St. Leibowitz

The palps are long and thin, so it's either a juvenile or a female. From the size, it wasn't a juvenile, so I'm left with female. The palps (from pedipalp) are the two short appendages coming out from the mouth area, which look like short legs.

The palps of adult male spiders develop as secondary sexual organs and are much larger. They can sometimes look like a pair of boxing gloves.