by Eric Neubauer
The rash of alien abductions in a certain sector of the Alligator Creek community has finally come to an end although they don’t know it yet. They have suffered being scooped up and moved through a series of examination rooms, often with bright lights, and being occasionally prodded for over two months now.
My earlier photos of Schizocosa perplexa weren’t good enough to do the species justice, so fixing that was on my project list for this winter. I started looking sooner, discovered the mid-juveniles in December and found they were easy to identify. Then I checked back whenever the weather was warm as the mating season approached. First the males became adults, and then finally the females just this week. Photos of a female are included here.
Whether they deserve a conservation status or not is unknown. They appear to have very specific habitat requirements, specifically wooded flood plains with long lasting vernal ponds. Substrate is important as I could only find them in two places in the Blackland Prairie part of the county. I’ve looked carefully in the Post Oak Savanna part and couldn’t find any. My local colony appears to have had a good year. The other colony in Milam County was gone this year. It may have been active
earlier but by the time I checked it last week, the ponds were already dried up and the leaf litter well picked through by armadillos. The original specimen came from Garland, Texas, and iNaturalist observations suggest robust populations in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. These observations lack underside views so the species can’t be confirmed. S. perplexa is also known to be in Ohio.
No spiders were harmed during this project and all are alive, free, and well at home unless they got eaten by a frog, armadillo or suffered some other misadventure.
Nature Along the El Camino Real 