Today, I spent some time, an hour or a little bit more, in the forest park at the edge of the city of Pula. I drove a bunch of friends to the center of the city where they had some stuff to buy & things to do ...
... and I drove to the nearest place with some unkempt, tall grass, shrubs & trees to wait in a quiet place at the safe distance from the hot asphalt of Pula.
I photographed only two creatures there. One insect ...
... and one spider.
Both the little predators had recently caught their prey and I caught them enjoying the meal.
The spider is a member of the Uloboridae family. The Uloborus walckenaerius.
Uloboridae are the only non-venomous spiders. They rely only on their silk to overpower the prey. Once the prey is enveloped and immobilized the spider covers it with regurgitated digestive enzymes that liquify the tissues making them ready to ingest.
The insect is a mantis ...
... the Mantis religiosa.
You can see two mantises of the same species in this series of photographs.
One of them is green. The other is brown. Both of them are young, not completely developed nymphs. Aside from the color, the hunter and the prey look practically the same.
The males are sometimes eaten by the larger and heavier females after the mating, but this isn't the case here.
For the mantises, especially the young, still developing ones that share the same area, cannibalism is often a way to get a meal when other insects that they can hunt aren't abundant.
Besides the absence of venom glands, a feature that sets them apart from all the other spiders, the Uloboridae have another interesting characteristic that sets them apart from other orb-weaving species. The threads that make their webs aren't adhesive, so the very fine fibers on each strand of silk have the function to ensnare the prey.
When it doesn't move, the Uloborus walckenaerius is a well-camouflaged spider that looks like a dried-out fragment that fell from some of the surrounding plants and got caught in the web. In these photographs, the spider is more recognizable because here you are looking at it through the macro lens. In a normal view, from a certain distance, it's very hard to spot.
Noticing the two mantises in a mix of green and dried-out grass was even harder.
I knew about the cannibalistic behavior among the nymphs, but I have never encountered it in nature. Until today.
The grass was tall and dense. It wasn't easy to get a clear shot. So I spent most of my time in the forest park at the edge of the city around the mantises. It took me what felt like an eternity to slowly fold and remove some stems and leaves to get a bit of clear space in between the insects and the lens of my camera.
It was an interesting encounter, and I returned home with much more than I expected.
Before walking back to the car, I noticed another cool thing in that area. A bunch of pretty large horizontal webs under a small oak tree. You can take a better, more up-close look at them in the following photograph.
These are the constructions of the Agelena labyrinthica spiders. They are usually active in the evening, during the night, and early in the morning, so I didn't see them today. The webs looked abandoned but the spiders were probably resting in the silky tunnels under the large horizontal webs that looked like mini-trampolines.
This feather of some small passerine bird was photographed near one of the webs.
The following links will take you to the sites with more information about the protagonists of this post. I found some stuff about them there.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/416680-Uloborus-walckenaerius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_mantis
AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS IN THESE POSTS ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.
