Tag Archives: arachnids

My first spider calendar

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My Dad is always urging me to send photographs to the nature organizations he’s fond of, with the hope that someday I might be featured in the calendars they send to their members and he can brag to his friends. I’m sick of the nudging so I decided to just make him one. Went with spiders because he’s less likely to know when I’ve misidentified something (he’s an entomologist). If you want to see the original of any of the images, they are all hyperlinked.

Sharing here, in part, in case anyone with experience ordering photo calendars can point me to a better online printing service. This one was from Shutterfly and was fairly easy to set up and configure, but I want to find a company that allows different formats of text within a single text box so that it’s easier to include both vernacular name and Latin binomial. Also, the one I sent to my Dad for Christmas never actually arrived, so I’m a bit disappointed in Shutterfly. And $30 seems expensive (I realize a coupon would help). Anyone have suggestions?

Cover spider is a golden silk orbweaver (Trichonephila clavipes). See original.

Bats with red spots

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During a 2008 trip to La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, I took a terrible photograph of some lesser sac-winged bats (Saccopteryx leptura) roosting on the underside of a tree.

Roosting bats covered with red dots

I kept the photograph because the bats seemed to sporting some strange red dots that were the color of giant red velvet or trombidium mites, and I was curious. But I looked online (for years) and for the life of me couldn’t find any reports of something that large on a bat in Costa Rica. All I succeeded in discovering was that quite a few smaller mites seem to be found on bats (Banks 1915; Klimpel and Mehlhorn 2013), with new species found all the time.

One person suggested that they might be chigger mites (Trombiculidae). Each spot, perhaps, would be composed of hundreds of mites feeding together. Chiggers feeding in a group isn’t rare, apparently. If you search for “trombiculidae aggregation” you’ll get lots of images of seething groups (e.g.) on all variety of animals. But it begs two questions. Why does each bat have only one clump, and of the same size.

UPDATE: After posting and sharing on Twitter, Sean McCann sent me a message asking whether my dots might be marking bands. He also sent a photograph (a good one) in which the locations of the bands exactly matched where my dots are in my photograph. So I contacted Dr Carlos de la Rosa, the Director at La Selva Biological Station, to see if anyone was banding bats at the time, and he responded that it was likely … and is checking to see exactly who. I’ll post an update if I hear back. 

UPDATE II: Dr de la Rosa spoke with Dr Martina Nagy, who claimed those bats as part of her research (as well as corrected my species identification; they are not rhinoceros bats). She even recognized the tree (“SOR 170 Sendero Oriental”). These individuals (two males, one female) had been banded by Dr Barbara Caspers. The tree eventually fell and then the bats disbanded to someplace else. 

It took me almost 10 years, but I’m glad I finally know what was going on. That photograph had really been bugging me. Thanks, everyone!