Identifying spiders is something I have always struggled with and invariably given up on, mainly due to the fact that they are incredibly challenging to identify for the beginner. I will happily key out the tiniest solitary bees but baulk at the prospect of naming these eight-legged beasties. My garden list languished for several years with a measly dozen or so species until I decided to get a grip with arachnids. This was partly due to the desire to include spiders in my book Arthropedia: An Illustrated Alphabet of Invertebrates but also it was an embarrassing hole in my natural history knowledge.

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I had long had spider identification guides gathering dust on my bookshelves but rarely looked at them. The difficulty in identification for many species arises from the need to have a mature adult spider to examine. Many is the time I’ve found a lovely spider only to find, as an immature, it simply cannot be identified to species. With an adult spider you need to examine the external sexual organs. In females this is the epigyne located on the underside of the abdomen and in males the palps (sensory organs that look like boxing gloves). This requires the spider to be confined in a specimen pot and looked at with a hand lens of x10 or greater. With larger species, and practice, this is possible in the field but it is much easier if they can be taken home and looked at under a microscope. So when I first started looking at spiders I began with the ones in my house and garden and then ventured into my local cemetery to expand my spider horizons. 

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Quite a few spiders are recognisable to species level in the field even if you are a complete beginner, like the Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus), Nurseryweb Spider (Pisaura mirabilis) and the crab spider Misumena vatia. So, after a couple of years of looking at spiders in my garden and local cemetery (and with lots of help from the Facebook group UK Spiders) I can now at least name the family or even genus of many species that I find. The Wildguides book ‘Britain’s Spiders: a field guide’ has been immensely useful and is a great gateway to starting to learn about spiders. Once you are familiar with the different families of spiders then the more detailed Collins Field Guide to Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe by Michael J. Roberts has lots of diagnostic drawings of epigynes and palps to enable you to accurately identify spiders to species, although a good hand lens or microscope are needed for this.

My fledgling garden spider list is now nearing 50 and I have been able to contribute some interesting records to the county spider recorder, including a first for Norfolk. There are still plenty that I haven’t been able to identify to species yet but my experience and knowledge has increased greatly and so has my enjoyment of spiders as I have discovered so much about them along the way. Here are a few highlights from the garden and cemetery.

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An introduction to spiders

But first, a little introduction to spiders. Like insects, spiders are arthropods and are characterised by having a hard external skeleton, a segmented body and jointed feet or limbs. They are in a different class though, the Arachnida (which also includes harvestmen, mites and ticks and scorpions and pseudoscorpions) which are distinguished from insects by having a body that is divided into two segments (comprising the cephalothorax and abdomen) rather than three and having four pairs of legs instead of three. Arachnids also have simple eyes compared to the compound eyes of insects and do not undergo metamorphosis. The true spiders are in the order Araneae. Most British spiders have eight eyes but a few have only six. 

Spiders are unique in having spinnerets from where they extrude silk from their silk glands. They use their silk most obviously for making webs (although several species don’t make webs), wrapping up prey, making protective sacs for their eggs and also for dispersing or migrating, known as ballooning. This is usually done by the smaller spiders, especially money spiders but also the juveniles of various species. The spider climbs to the top of a grass stem or other tall object, straightens its legs as though standing on tip-toe and raises its abdomen. It then spins out a strand of silk which is caught by the breeze and lifts the spider up into the air.

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Parental Care

Some spiders take surprising care of their young. In the wolf spiders (Lycosidae) the female carries her egg sac around attached to the spinnerets and also transports the newly hatched spiderlings clustered on top of her abdomen for the first few days. Several species sit guard over their egg sac until they die, some actually becoming a meal for their offspring – the ultimate sacrifice.

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Pisaura mirabilis is known as the Nurseryweb Spider. They are very common in my garden and can be found at almost any time of year. In spring the immature spiders bask openly on low vegetation in the sunshine but quickly hide away if I approach too closely and cast a shadow over them. Later on in June I am sometimes lucky enough to find a female carrying her pale white egg sac around, carefully held in her jaws (chelicerae) but they are often quite secretive at this time. They are much easier to spot when sitting guard on top of their nursery web in our mini meadow, waiting for the spiderlings to hatch.

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Crab Spiders

Rather than spinning a web, the crab spiders (Thomisidae) sit about on flowers (or other vegetation) waiting in ambush. When an insect lands on a flower to get pollen or nectar, the spider grabs them with its strong, spined front legs and quickly sinks in its fangs to paralyse them with venom. Then simply sits and suck the life out of it!

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Misumena vatia is a very distinctive crab spider, the female especially so and easily recognised although they have two colour forms – yellow and white. In fact they are able to change colour to better fit in with their surroundings, although this can take several days. Mature females often have red stripes along the sides of the abdomen. The males are very different to the females but are still easy to identify. 

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Another crab spider that is readily identifiable, even in its immature stages, is Diaea dorsata. Sometimes called the Green Crab Spider, this species is usually found on the foliage of trees, typically evergreens but also on oak and other deciduous trees where it is perfectly camouflaged. The first one I came across was rescued from the bath, presumably having drifted in through the open window or hitched a ride on one of us as we came in from the garden.

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Orb Weavers

The family Araneidae are the orbweb spiders who construct what we think of as the classic spider web. These elaborate structures are designed to snare prey and have a sticky spiral of silk that traps anything that enters. They can be quite conspicuous, especially when adorned with dew or on a frosty morning. The orb weavers include the well-known Garden Spider (Araneus diadematus) pictured at the beginning of this article and some quite colourful species like the Cucumber Spiders (Araniella sp) and Araneus marmoreus as well as some extremely well camouflaged species like Gibbaranea gibbosa, one of my favourite spiders. 

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Small is Beautiful

There are lots of very small spiders out there. Everyone will be familiar with ‘money spiders’, the tiny black critters that end up in your hair or clothes on hot summer days when the air is full of strands of silk as these tiny aeronauts make their way in the world on fine strands of silk, carried off in the lightest of breezes. But there are lots of other mini species out there too. Many of these are in the Theridiidae (the comb-footed spiders) which does also include some large species, notably Steatoda species or False Widows and Enoplognatha or Candy-striped Spiders. Most are far too small for me to be able to identify them but one in particular gives itself away by producing a distinctive egg sac which I invariably find when I’m hunting for galls on the underside of oak leaves in late summer in the cemetery. This is Paidiscura pallens.

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Enoplognatha sp. These spiders are quite variable in colour, some are greenish white while others have varying amounts of red, hence the name ‘candy-striped’ I suppose.

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Jumpers

The Salticidae are known as jumping spiders and include some of my absolute favourite species. Rather than building a web, these little spiders actively seek out their prey and can be found on walls, fences, trees and flowers, generally in warm sunny weather when there are plenty of flies and other insects about for them to prey upon. Jumpers are pretty distinctive, having short, stout powerful legs and large prominent eyes. They have exceptional eyesight and jump onto their prey to capture it. 

Salticus scenicus, the Common Zebra Spider, will be familiar to many as it is often associated with man (known as being synanthropic) and is often found on sunny walls and fences as it hunts prey. 

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Heliophanus spiders are sometimes called sun jumpers. They can be found sitting on flowers in sunshine, disappearing down into the vegetation when it is cloudy. I was delighted to find one in the cemetery and even more pleased when a couple turned up in the garden. Unfortunately they were all juveniles so I cannot say for certain which species they were, only narrowing it down to either H. cupreus or H. flavipes.

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Pirates

As has been seen, not all spiders build webs. Many hunt down their prey while others sit and wait for it to come to them. A small family of spiders have taken a different tack altogether. These are known as pirate spiders and are in the family Mimetidae although the German name of ‘Spinnenfresser’ (spider eaters) is perhaps more appropriate for these little dears invade the webs of other spiders and eat their occupants. 

There are four species in Britain, all in the genus Ero. Although small, they are very distinctive with raised bumps or tubercles on their abdomens. Two species have four tubercles while the others have only two. They carefully enter another spider’s web and pluck at the silken strands, pretending to be prey themselves or even a potential mate. When the web’s occupier comes to investigate the ‘pirate’ quickly bites it, injecting venom to paralyse it and then sucks out its vital fluids, usually through a hole made in one of its legs. Ero spiders are easily overlooked but their distinctive egg sac often gives away their presence.

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The two species that have four tubercles, Ero aphana and Ero tuberculata, are rarely recorded in Norfolk so it was a tad annoying that when I found one in the cemetery and then another in my house that they were both sub-adults. I was therefore delighted when an adult male turned up so that I could conclusively identify it as Ero aphana.

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Coming Soon?

And lastly, one to look out for – Nigma walckenaeria. These beautiful little spiders (known by their fans as green goblins!) have recently been found in Norfolk. I discovered them at another local patch, along the cycle path at Sweet Briar Marshes, last winter. They are generally found on evergreen bushes, Laurel being particularly favoured but I found mine on Ivy.  The female sits under a ‘tent’ of silk spun across the centre of a leaf.  It is this distinctive web that usually gives away the presence of the spider. I am hopeful that they will find their way a bit nearer to me soon, perhaps to the cemetery or, better still, my garden.

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Spiders feature in several plates in Arthropedia: An Illustrated Alphabet of Invertebrates, including ‘A is for Arachnids’, ‘J is for Jumpers and Jewels’ and and ‘L is for Legs’.