The Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver

The Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver is a very small (~3mm), strange looking spider and their long name reflects this. They have a black tubercle (bump) at the end of their abdomens and their red jammies are quite striking. The crimson may look good on me (despite my wife's insistence that I should dress for my winter-spring skin palette), but it doesn't make for good camouflage in grasses and shrubbery (click the link!). Maybe their small size and the fact that they're passive hunters eliminates the need for much camouflage. The fact-checkers are telling me that this is the first spider I've written about who is a passive hunter, so let me explain this. A passive hunter is one that lies in wait for its prey, rather than going out and chasing it down. Blacktailed Red Sheetweavers have an interesting web design - no flying toasters or flashing text (When was the last time you read a book on web design, Brian? 1998!?).  Their webs are made up of randomly-strung stopping-strands above a loosely woven sheet. The stopping strands knock little bugs out of the air and onto the top of the sheet, through which, they are bitten by the upside-down hanging spider (this is OK though, as nothing done through a hole in this sheet actually counts). The Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver actually spends most of its life upside down - you'll notice this in this post's pictures, as well as the pictures in their Flickr photo-set (I didn't just rotate them weird).


For a single girl, Florinda thought she had it all: a web all her own in a trendy
part of the lawn, all the gnats and little flies that she could eat (pictured!), and
her dream job writing for a women's-interest magazine. But she was about to
find out how much more there is to life! Because a chance meeting with Mr. Right
is about to turn her whole world upside down. When an impulse wedding leads
to a high-profile photo shoot and instant internet stardom, they just might find
that their spacious web in a high rise pepper plant gets a little too small for their
egos!...Starring: Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones!


The Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver, or Florinda coccinea, is not considered to be a common spider species. Before last summer, I had never seen them in my yard or garden (yarden?). So I believe that the female I saw in my lawn in July is the same female that had shacked up in my Jamaican Hot Scotchbonnet pepper plant in August.

As spider species go, males are either about the same size as females, or the males are much smaller (those guys prefer a woman with some meat). For a female spider, it's common for a similarly sized male to make its own web adjacent to her's, or for a tiny male to live in the female's web - mostly on the periphery. But it's not common for a male and a female of similar size to share a web and truly cohabitate. By cohabitating, I mean that the male shares the web for a longer term than courting and mating requires, and it's not just her web that he's crashing in - he actually takes some responsibility for constructing, cleaning and maintaining the web (uncommon, am I right ladies!?). But this is the case for the Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver.

As I observed this pair last August, it occurred to me that, although they were living together, the female wasn't wearing a ring. This concerned me greatly because, not only were they living in sin, but they were also overpaying in income tax by not being able to take advantage of the joint-filer deduction! So, having become an ordained minister in the online Universal Life Church some years ago, I performed their marital rites (I'm pretty sure I had their permission) with the family of (already married) Mourning Doves (probably mourning their loss of independence, am I right guys!?) that live under my porch as witnesses. With that out of the way, I put them into a container so that I could observe them more and get some good pics of them (honeymoon pics?).



The female Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver pictured above wants to try out some
new coloration this season. She looks in her closet every morning and sighs over
her form-flattering, but monochromatic, wardrobe. Plus, that B* (or is she a bee?)
that she's always in competition with at the magazine she writes for just wrote an
article saying that black spots were 2000-and-late!



I've found that many web building spiders have a hard time walking on flat surfaces. But usually when I see this, it's a large female spider with a huge abdomen that she can't lift (the phrase of the week is: Yo mamma's butt is sooooo big, that when she sits down...she gets taller! I hope you liked that one because you'll probably hear this phrase again in a future post). I don't believe that this was the case for these two, but they had a hard time getting their footing. I ended up adding some natural material to their photo-booth container and giving them some time to web-up their new scaffolding. When I returned, I found them settled in and upside down in their newly-webbed  container (because they were just married...you might need to say that out loud to get it).

But I believe that these two spiders were in the middle of a little spat. Now as anyone who's lived with a significant other knows, it's not always as pleasant and agreeable as what was depicted in The Honeymooners - with their frequent, romantically-charged discussions about space travel and lunar exploration (perhaps this is not the timeliest reference...you might have to ask your parents about this joke. Better yet, ask your grandparents. If Mee-maw & Pappy aren't still with us or aren't from here, your best bet will be any white person in a retirement home - they'll know what's up). So I was doing that awkward thing where you're obviously standing right there but you're pretending not to hear the fight that's going on next to you, hoping that the bickering couple will realize how rude they're being...Anyway, the gist was that she was upset about having to move to a new place without a lot of notice and, of course, she wanted (him) to repaint it. But neither of them really knew how long they would be there for - blah, blah, blah. Eventually I just tried to tune it out. But I could tell that the Mourning Doves felt super awkward.



The male Blacktailed Red Sheetweaver pictuerd above doesn't understand why
the female wants to go and spend a bunch of money on a whole new wardrobe.
He thinks she looks great in what she has! And besides, crimson with a black
dot is the look that defines the spider he fell in love with...But when was the last
time he told her so?



Then, at some point, I accidentally jostled their circular container and one of them started running along the web spun around the edge. He ran around the circle until he got close to his wife, where he stopped. But then she started running the same circuit. They did this about 10 times - each one successively running around the same track while the other waited in place. They looked like a Newton's Cradle pendulum or like they were practicing for a relay race (but there was no batton - far out!). They may have just been disagreeing on who had to sleep on the couch, but continually running away and avoiding each other is a tiresome way to not resolve a fight.

All that running was really making it hard for me to take good pictures. So I eventually butted in and told them their business.

Enter: Brian, Bug Therapist

So we all sat down and I played marriage counselor. At first, they both said the standard stuff: she thought marriage would be different and he thinks she's changed, he thinks she spends too much money but she feels like he doesn't treat her like a partner financially, you know. So we ended up having one of those long Venus & Mars, Love & Respect, 5 Love Languages discussions. By the time I let them go, I think they were finally ready to stop holding each other accountable for their own baggage, they were able to articulate their expectations to one another (guys - nothing helps a woman understand what's important to you like saying nothing; ladies - nothing helps a man appreciate your expectations like griping to your girlfriends), and rather than treating each other how they would want to be treated, they finally started treating each other how the other wanted to be treated (I am so Steve Carell!...Why isn't anyone laughing? Oh, I guess no one saw Hope Springs. I mean, I didn't. But I heard that Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones were adorable together).

All I want for my birthday is a big-booty ho
 - Tauheed Epps (AKA: 2 Chainz, formerly Tity Boy)