Monday 14 November 2011

Trapdoor & stubby wings

Cleaning leaves from the pool and noticed a spider on the bottom which looked to be either a Funnel web or a Trapdoor. When I got it out I could see that it was one of the 66 trapdoor species found in Australia, although I don't know the specific one. They can give a painful bite but are considered harmless. It was half drowned but spiders can survive for quite some time underwater so it was starting to recover when I took the photo.

This afternoon's I notice a moth moving through the grass and showing no inclination to want to fly and on closer inspection noticed it had very stubby wings that looked unlikely to enable it to get off the ground. as yet I haven't identified the species but I noted there are a number of species in which one of the sexes is flightless.

2 comments:

  1. An interesting looking spider Ian. We get some moth species here in England where the females are flightless.

    I love the whipsnake photo from yesterday.

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  2. Thanks again for your comments; much appreciated.
    In looking into the flightless moth I discovered that the most famous is probably the female Gypsy Moth. I thought was it a bit ironic that a plane was named after a moth one side of the species couldn't fly.

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