Green-head Ant Mimic
Male, profile
Marbled Swift Spider
S2, Female, dorsal
Animals
Plants
Info
| Green-head Ant Mimic Male, profile | | Marbled Swift Spider S2, Female, dorsal | | ||
Animals Plants Info |
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Spiders, Scorpions, Mites & Ticks (Arachnida) | ||||||||||||
| Order: | Spiders (Araneae) | |||||||||||||
| Family: | Swift Spider (Corinnidae) iNaturalist Observation | |||||||||||||
| Species: | Marbled Swift Spider (Ticopa australis)| This Photo: | 🔍S1, Male, dorsal🔎 | Thank you Mark Newton for identifying and Dr Volker Framenau & Dr Robert Raven for helping with the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere A medium sized spider with body & head length of ~7-10mm. Males & Females are similar size. While it looks like T. hudsoni, Robert said "It should be Ticopa australis" in that region. "The patterns are not absolute, especially with the few specimens we have of Ticopa". The male palps need to be examined under a microscope to make a definitive id. Robert described the species in 2015, which highlights how impossible it is for ameteurs to be certain of their species id. We originally thought we had a Prowling, Water or perhaps even Orb spider here. Very long legs, all about equal length and spacing. Found on our annex wall. It has a lot of red/brown "skin" showing, with a lot of black blotches & spots. Black spikes (like a Lynx spider), with very short white/grey hair sparsely scattered on the body and legs. The abdomen is completely covered (above, sides & below) in short hair; mainly white/grey except for the black hair in a triangular edged stripe down the back and dappled underneath. The legs do have very fine hair on them, but it's almost invisible. It has 4 small spinnerets near the rear tip, not visible from above Most importantly the eye arrangement: 2 rows of 4 (but the rows are curved, not straight). The 6 largest (most obvious) eyes make a hexagon shape. Mark said "Raven looked at 8 specimens from the riverland and surrounding areas and only found one species, which he called australis. **He demonstrated that the female was morphologically different to that of the female *hudsoni * via female reproductive morphology. **No female from the southern SA region was found to have the same reproductive morphology as that of hudsoni. There were no male hudsoni found for comparison unfortunately. Quite a few specimens of Ticopa have now turned up on iNat from the southern SA region. It would seem odd to me that all of these specimens were somehow overlooked in Raven's generic and species diagnoses considering how common they are. If hudsoni was found in the southern region, Raven would have found it in the sampling and published it as such."
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