We search for spiders and scorpions, at night, by Lake Talquin

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On the face of it, the goal of this outing was to collect insects, spiders, and other arthropods. Once we set out into the night, though, it became a form of therapy for some of us. It started with a suggestion to shine flashlights into the grass by the Fort Braden trailhead.

“We were told, yeah, take your flashlight, go into the grass, and see a bunch of glaring things- that’s the spiders,” says Hannah Hansted, a studio art major at Florida State University. “And then I did it and there’s literally hundreds just a few feet away from me.

“I kind of lost my arachnophobia that way. Because, if there’s one trillion spiders in your area, you just have to get used to them.”

It soon went beyond green points of light to spiders in hand, and brushes with black widows.

Evan Daley handled the spiders; arachnids have long been a source of fascination for him. This led Evan to a high school internship with the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville. The collection is managed by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS), with support from the Florida Museum of Natural History. It is home to over 12 million specimens, some over 100 years old. Researchers have access to the specimens, which have contributed to over 2,000 published studies.

Now, as a biology major at FSU, Evan is sharing the methodology of collecting and displaying specimens with his fellow students.

ESA SEEDS at FSU

Tonight’s group is the FSU SEEDS club. This is a chapter of The Ecological Society of America Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity, and Sustainability (ESA SEEDS). For obvious reasons, I’ll just refer to them as SEEDS. The members are a mix of majors, though biology is well represented. It’s a way for FSU students to get out and experience local ecology.

Evan coordinated the collection outing and a meeting two days later, where members pinned their finds. It’s a process that requires capturing animals in their habitats, and killing them while preserving their bodies. The goal is to display the specimens so that researchers can examine them closely.

There has been debate in recent years over the ethics of lethal sampling. Researchers find it a valuable tool, as many insect species can only be identified by examining a physical specimen, either under a microscope or dissected. With arthropods in hand, scientists can do the work to distinguish between closely related species, and to discover new species. It’s a standard practice, but some researchers are starting to consider alternative methods of nonlethal sampling.

Evan obtained a permit to collect insects in Lake Talquin State Forest. He brought an array of collection tools, and they’ll place every insect they collect in a kill jar. The goal is for the arthropod to die as quickly as possible as they inhale ethyl acetate fumes.

“This is the most ethical way to euthanize them,” Evan says as he preps the crew.

Arthropod hunting gear

• Nets: simple, old school.
• Black lights and white sheets: “Things that come out at night,” Evan says, “they really like this ultraviolet frequency because it reminds of the moon.” Insects use the ultraviolet light reflected by the moon to navigate, and are drawn to blacklight-illuminated sheets.
• Aspirators: These are jars with two tubes. An insect collector inhales from one tube, and an insect is sucked into the other, and into the jar. These are ideal for small insects.
• Kill Jars: The bottom of each jar is lined with a layer of Plaster of Paris, which is soaked in ethyl acetate.
• Headlamps and flashlights.
• Pit traps: Evan set these up before the others arrived. We don’t really see them in the video, as there weren’t many dramatic finds here. It works like the drift fences used by the Coastal Plains Institute around their striped newt ponds. Arthropods crawling on the ground run into a strip of metal, and follow it until they fall into a buried cup. Evan set these up a couple of hours before we checked them, and removed them before we left to avoid unnecessarily trapping additional arthropods.

Where are we bug* hunting?

Evan is leading us into two different habitat types in Lake Talquin State Forest.

One is a mixed hardwood forest, a densely wooded area. These are typically found on slopes or near water, where fire is less likely to kill or stunt the growth of oaks, cherries, and other hardwoods. You can find similar habitats in Tallahassee, at Elinor Klapp-Phipps Park, Timberlane Ravine Trail, or AJ Henry Park.

The other setting is a sandhill, a fire dependent longleaf/ wiregrass ecosystem. We visit a small section of sandhill within the state forest, and it lacks wiregrass. We do find some of the wildflowers you’d expect here, such as blazingstars. Most of our local longleaf savannas are in different states of restoration, often reclaimed timber land. More representative examples of sandhills in the area include the Munson Sandhills and the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve. Click the links, and you’ll see I’ve spent plenty of time documenting both places.

*True bugs are the order Hemiptera. The family includes stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, and assassin bugs. To an entomologist, these are the only critters called bugs. I usually stick to that, but then sometimes I don’t.

Spiders under logs, spiders up in trees

So, what do we find in the forest at night?

“I usually am not a very insect person,” says Josie Whelan, a biology (ornithology concentration)/ psychology double major, “But it is kind of cool where you went outside for the first hour and then it’s like, oh my gosh, now you can find the spiders everywhere.”

Spiders were the stars at our first stop: the mixed hardwood forest.

White-banded fishing spider (Dolomites albineus)

Fishing spiders are common in and near our waterways. They walk on the water surface, hunting for aquatic insect larvae. They may also make a meal of a small fish or amphibian larvae.

According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, this is the only fishing spider species we might see “away from water, resting on vertical surfaces such as tree trunks or walls.” And here we find it.

Here’s a closer look:

Says Evan about the white-banded fishing spider, “It’s not very often, especially in Florida, to see a spider of that size.”

Georgia wolf spider (Tigrosa georgicola)

This is a 90% certainty pick for the species of wolf spider. It is a research grade observation on iNaturalist, and there are several iNaturalist IDs for this species of wolf spider on the Fort Braden Trails:

Evan found this spider in soft log he broke apart. Decomposing wood is a prime habitat for insects and other invertebrates. Georgia wolf spiders rest under logs during the day, and come out to hunt insects in the leaf litter (another prime insect habitat).

Here’s a different species of wolf spider you might see during the day. I know the image recognition software has improved since e 2019, but when I first uploaded this image to iNaturalist, it recommended mammal species. They are fearsome looking, and fearsome to their prey, but harmless to humans.

Northern black widow (Latrodectus variolus)

“That was so sketchy,” Evan said after lowering a black widow spider into a vial of ethyl acetate. “That almost bit my hand probably three times [while lowering it in].”

All spiders are venomous, though the potency of that venom various from species to species. According to the Michigan State University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, a northern black widow has venom 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake. They usually don’t inject a large amount of venom when they bite, so less than one percent of bites are fatal. Evan compares a typical black widow bite to a bad flu that keeps you bedridden for a day or two.

You could hear the reactions from the other SEEDS when Evan handled black widows. He found three by turning over logs and scattering the leaves around them. Black widows have a painful and potentially lethal bite, and it turns out they are common in places we might like to hike. But we are unlikely to see them, unless we go looking for them.

In the video, you can see a black widow crawling around in the kill jar for a little bit. Way to act terrifying, black widow.

Brown widow (Latrodectus geometricus)

Brown widow is an introduced species that has spread to the point where it can’t be controlled. Like the black widow, it’s a shy spider, and unlikely to bite. It also has a weaker venom than its sister species. The concern with any nonnative species that spreads out of control is that it outcompetes native species with a similar niche.

Evan found brown widow webs on a fence near the trailhead. These are spiders that build webs on human structures, including houses. Here’s what the webs look like:

Golden silk orb weaver (Trichonephila clavipes)

We saw a few of these spiders as we walked between sites. What drew us to them, in part, was walking into the anchor lines of their webs. We’d walk into one, and look up until our headlamps caught sight of a spider high above us. Can you imagine what it takes to make such a web? They would have to climb a pine tree on one side of the trail, and drop down on their line, and repeat the process on the other side of the trail.

I arrived before the SEEDS crew to shoot a little footage of the habitat, and found this one by the pavilion:

Not every orb weaver web you walk into a is a golden orb weaver (also known as banana spider). Here’s one I found at Angus Gholson Nature Park in Chattahoochee:

Other finds in the hardwood forest

Bess bug/ horned Passalus beetle (Odontotaenius disjunctus)

Here’s a fearsome looking insect that Evan found in a decomposing log. That log was its home, and its food. Myriad insect species help turn dead wood into soil, making nutrients available to future plants.

A horned Passalus beetle uses its large mandibles to grind soft, decomposing wood into a pulp that it and its larvae can eat.

Lesser angle-winger katydid (Microcentrum retinerve)

Here is a good example of what a pinned specimen can tell us about the body structure of an insect. We only ever see katydids with their leaf-like wings folded over their bodies, as in the left photo. In the right image, we see its thorax, abdomen, and its lacy underwings.

I looked up my iNaturalist observations for katydids, and while I had never observed this species, I had photographed a few different ones that looked very much like it. The spreadsheet Evan sent me also lists a shieldback katydid that I did not photograph that night. I have seen shieldbacks in other locations:

I saw that one on the Garden of Eden Trail in the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve. Not in the sandhill, but in the slope forest around a steephead ravine. Slope forests are a type of mixed hardwood forest, found only in the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines region in Gadsden and Liberty counties. Those, of course, are highly biodiverse ecosystems, and well-covered on the WFSU Ecology Blog.

I also wanted to share what young katydids look like, because I think they are so cool. All insects are born in an immature form, and progress through several stages of that form before metamorphosing into adults. Insect larvae are almost entirely different insects than their adult selves. Think of caterpillars and butterflies, or maggots and flies. Some insects have nymphs, though, which hatch in a form that more closely resembles the adult. They look more like baby version of the adult, rather than a pale grub.

Into the sandhill- with scorpions

We move to the sandhill, and the nature of our search changes. The ground is not covered with leaves, which decompose and form a layer of rich humus. In sandhill, pine needles cover sand not unlike beach sand; sandhills once were beaches, millions of years ago. Rather than decompose, pine needles fuel fire, and burn away. Sandhills don’t have a layer of organic matter like you’d find in a hardwood forest. Not if they’re maintained with regular fire, mimicking wildfires that would have burned naturally in this habitat type.

Sandhill animals typically burrow in sand, or hide in decomposing pine stumps or under logs. This where scorpions spend their days. Like many species of their arachnid cousins, the spiders, scorpions come out at night to hunt.

I start the video with the moment we are gathered a round a scorpion, and Evan tells us to turn off our lights. You can hear the reaction as the scorpion glows the same as glow in the dark stars on a ceiling. Scorpion exoskeletons contain a protein called beta-carboline, which fluoresces in ultraviolet light.

Why do they do this? Perhaps, in the ultraviolet light shining down from the moon, scorpions might see each other glow a little, and find each other. That’s one hypothesis I found, but no one knows for sure.

Noticing insects, spiders, and even scorpions around you

People don’t always notice the insects and spiders around them. In a recent post on longhorn bees, I wrote about insect blindness. Walking slowly, looking down, noticing small things in motion in the air and on the ground, you will see perhaps more insects than you thought would be around you. It’s true in your yard, and more so in a forest or pine savanna.

If you walk slowly on the Munson Sandhills trail, especially when it’s warm and flowers are in bloom, you will see insects of every shape and size. And don’t just focus on the flowers. There are quite a lot crawling on the sand, or on leaves or tree trunks.

For every arthropod you see, though, how many remain hidden from view? If you come out at night, if you move logs and scatter leaves, how many do you see then? And how many more stay high in trees, or buried in nests? Or in gopher tortoise burrows?

In one night by Lake Talquin, we got a sense for how many black widows lie hidden in places we hike. We found two scorpions in the sandhill, and, we didn’t spend much effort looking for them specifically. Shine a light on your lawn one night and see how many spider eyes glow.

Multiple members of FSU SEEDS overcame an aversion to spiders by encountering so many of them in the wild. I have a feeling that many readers might feel the opposite after reading this. Maybe it’s not a comfort that spiders are all around you. The thing is, spiders and scorpions don’t eat humans. They would prefer to spend their venom on their food, and to avoid confrontations with animals that can easily squash them. If we stop and look, and keep our hands to ourselves, we will see worlds we never knew existed. They’ve been there all along.

Bonus: one more spider you might see in the forest now

We have pages on the blog dedicated to the various bees, wasps, and flies I encounter in the garden and in the wild. I should probably make one for spiders next. Going over my spider photos, I notice what a diverse lot they are. I treat them as side characters in the lives (and deaths) of the insects I write about. It’s time to learn more about them, and give them their due.

I’d like to share one now that I’ve seen in my yard and in sandhills: the green lynx spider. In the summer months, they’re a translucent green. They lie on flowers and snag pollinators:

Around this time of year, as we head into November and December, lynx spiders mate. Females will carry eggs on their backs.

The wildflower in the image above is going to seed. As wildflowers lose their leaves and the forest turns brown, so do females. And when her eggs hatch, the small spiders are brown, too.