Webnesday (67) Trapeze Artist?

Late yesterday (Webnesday) CD found this little spider in our kitchen and called it to my attention. I carefully eased it into a small container with a flower to keep it for the night. Today I released it onto a different flower (a type of dandelion) from our garden before releasing it. My research indicates that it’s a trapezoid crab spider (Sidymella trapezia); I think it was a female but I’m not sure (the females reach a length of 6 mm and the males 4 mm). I measured the diameter of the flower at 4 cm, so I’m pretty confident of my guess. They are also found in Australia and South America. (Click on a photo for a larger view.)

About krikitarts

Welcome to Krikit Arts! I'm a veterinarian; photographer; finger-style guitarist, composer, instructor, and singer/songwriter; fisherman; and fly-tyer. Please enjoy--and please respect my full rights to all photos on this Website!
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16 Responses to Webnesday (67) Trapeze Artist?

  1. Mike Powell says:

    What a cool-looking spider, Gary. I love the angular shape of its body, which is pretty distinctive for a spider. It is interesting that you found it in your kitchen. Wow!

  2. Cool little cutie. So much diversity. Btw, the link for the second image takes us to the first instead.

  3. Ah, British (and by extension New Zealand) English versus American English. During my math teaching years I learned that trapezoid, which for us is ‘a quadrilateral with exactly one pair of sides parallel,’ in British English means ‘a quadrilateral with no parallel sides.’ That’s what I see in this spider’s body. That body also fits the technical definition of a dart: ‘a concave quadrilateral with two pairs of adjacent, equal sides.’ I suspect your spider knows none of that.

    • krikitarts says:

      I did not know that the American and the British trapezoid are different–fascinating. And I looked up the dart (looks more like an arrowhead) and found it to be the counterpart to a kite. What fun.

      • Yes, the difference between a kite and a dart is that the former is convex, the latter concave. A kite can be transformed into the other by picking the vertex between the shorter pair of equal sides and moving it along the line of symmetry toward the opposite vertex. At the moment of transition from a kite to a dart the figure is an isosceles triangle.

  4. shoreacres says:

    The first thing I noticed was the shape, so it pleased me that someone else in the long-ago had decided to memorialize the shape in the spider’s name. It’s position in the first photo does suggest some similarity to our crab spiders, and their way of lurking about to snag prey.

  5. bluebrightly says:

    Your kindness was repaid! :-)

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