On the 7th of October this year, I spent a couple of morning hours on the outskirts of Pula, and I encountered a very common arachnid there. Although the arachnid was common and hardly worth the effort of pulling the camera out of the bag and mounting the macro lens on it, the situation was pretty cool, definitively something that I rarely observed, so I ended up taking many photographs. And I recorded some footage too.
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I brought some friends to the shopping mall in the city. We drove from Medulin, our hometown, very early, before the opening of the stores. It was five minutes before the opening when I left my friends in the parking lot in front of the store and drove to the suburban forest park a couple of kilometers from there.
The morning was fresh but not cold, and above all, it was very humid.
The large horizontal webs built by the Agelena orientalis spiders on the blackberry shrubs were decorated with a multitude of shiny droplets. Not far from one of those webs, always on the same kind of thorny shrub ...
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... the Phalangium opilio harvestman was eating a moth. A moth from the Noctuidae family. Can't tell you the exact species.
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These harvestmen usually hunt soft-bodied arthropods such as aphids, caterpillars, leafhopper nymphs, beetle larvae, maggots - that kind of stuff. But they don't get their food always by hunting.
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If there is an opportunity to scavenge a small carcass, they will feed on all kinds of dead insects.
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Some hours later, in the afternoon, back home, I found another arachnid in my bathroom.
The Zygiella x-notata has recently caught a housefly (Musca domestica).
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This spider from the Araneidae family has built a web on my bathroom window.
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Zygiella x-notata is one of those species that like to hang in or near human homes and settlements across Europe. I have a few more photographs to show, but now is time to roll the video. 😀 You'll see only the harvestman in it. Have a good viewing. It's a short thing enhanced with a bit of free - to use - music found on Pixabay.
You can see a harvestman feeding on a moth carcass in this short video. More often than not, my videos are only a small part of a longer post that explains more about the subject. That's the case here as well. The scientific name of this particular harvestman is Phalangium opilio. If you would like to read a few more words about it, you can take a look at the entire post on Hive.
▶️ 3Speak
And that's it.
Hope you had enough ...
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... because the post ends here - THE END.
The following links will take you to the sites with more information about the protagonists of this post that ended a few seconds ago. I found some stuff about them there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalangium_opilio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zygiella_x-notata
AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS, AND THE VIDEO ARE MY WORK.
THE AUDIO, HOWEVER, I MEAN, THE MUSIC IN THE VIDEO, IS SOME COOL FREE-TO-USE STUFF FOUND ON PIXABAY.
Music by EvgenyBardyuzha from Pixabay