Linyphiidae
- Dubiaraneinae
- Erigoninae
- Linyphiinae
- Micronetinae
- Mynogleninae
- Stemonyphantinae
The canopy spider, web spider ceiling or dwarf spiders ( Linyphiidae ) are a family of spiders. It includes about 4314 species worldwide in 569 genera. They are currently classified into six subfamilies. In Central Europe, about 500 species have been recorded.
This usually only 1.5 to 3 mm large spiders are perceived only in the morning dew on the basis of their networks, they often close to the ground in meadows or in the shrub layer, horizontal and slightly arched like a canopy, weave. Striking are the strings in the late summer and autumn, with which they move in the wind; as well as the winter activity of some dwarf spiders.
Lifestyle and prey capture
The coloring of the canopy spiders camouflage against their enemies, when they hangs under its horizontally stretched grid. Your abdominal side facing upward is darker in color and difficult to see against the ground. Your back against it is lighter in color, so it also provides a cover against the bright sky.
The canopy that covers web spiders sit upside down in the middle on the bottom, is excited from below by threads. To top the spiders pull sticky ' threads crash "in which catches the prey. Frequently, the Spider shakes her booty to the underlying network; the glue threads in the ceiling and in the crash threads do not play an equal role in all genres. She bites with their chelicerae by the network in the prey, stunning them. Then she bites a hole in the ceiling and drags her prey to extra-intestinal digestion down. The damaged ceiling and crash strands are repaired only after the food intake.
The power of the canopy or ceiling -web spiders has distant relationship with the networks of funnel spiders ( Agelenidae ), va the labyrinth spiders ( Agalena ) that weave several blankets over each other and with those of the ball spinning ( cobweb spiders) ( Theridiidae ), the weave sticky loosened and diffuse blanket on. The Lauerstellung the canopy spider, however, is clearly distinguishable.
Sexually mature males rarely weave their own networks, but embark on the search for a female. Even longer time after the hour-long live the male mating with the females in the same network, but very marginalized.
Habitats and " airships " as propagation strategy
The family is distributed worldwide and inhabited very different habitats of all the climates of Congo ( Labullula annulipes ) on beaches ( the seaweed), Himalaya ( Piniphantes himalayensis ) up to the Arctic coasts. By far the richest and most widespread are the almost " ubiquitous" species Erigone, Bathyphantes, Leptyphantes and Walckenaeri ( = Walckenaera ). In Central Europe very often Erigone atra and Bathyphantes gracilis.
In contrast to other species, in which only the young animals with the help of a " flight thread" can ship by the wind, to avoid the cannibalism of their kind due to excessive population density of closely packed growing up animals that fly in the species in the family Linyphiidae also adult animals, so this certainly represents the thousands in the summer and in the winter a successful strategy for dissemination.
The spiders stretch to the back of her body into the air and produce a flight thread. If the thread is long enough, he catches the wind and transported called " airships " the spider " ballooning " or. Heats up the quiet winter air, direct sunlight in winter rapidly on the ground, the spider can lift up and ship. They fall thereby in particular in the late summer ( " Indian Summer " ) and in the winter. You can mass occur to be gone only a little later.
You achieve this, several thousand meters of altitude and fly several hundred kilometers. So they were caught out of airplanes and Charles Darwin reported in 1832 in his diary, 100 km off the coast of South America would have countless small spiders caught in the rigging of his research vessel. We now know that they can adjust the height and flight duration by the length of its thread. However, very few survive their trips. Most land on the water, in unsuitable habitats or become less numerous, eaten by birds. Only at sufficiently high speed can also neubesiedeln remote islands.
The British popularly knows under the name money spider, which, if it lands on one, brings financial luck ( " new clothes weaves ").
Nomenclature of Linyphiidae
Currently, the family is divided into six subfamilies according to Andrei V. Tanasevitch:
- Dubiaraneinae ( Millidge, 1993), 87 types
- Erigoninae ( Emerton, 1882), 2141 species
- Linyphiinae ( Blackwall, 1859), 819 species
- Micronetinae (Hull, 1920), 1113 species
- Mynogleninae ( Lehtinen, 1967), 115 species
- Stemonyphantinae ( Wunderlich, 1986), 14 species
Cladogram for " Tree of Life Project ":
Stemonyphantinae
Mynogleninae
Erigoninae
Linyphiini
Micronetini (?)
Pimoinae ( Dubiarareneinae (?) )
Swell
- Heiko Bellmann: Spider: watch - determine the nature Verlag, Augsburg 1992, ISBN 3-89440-064-1
- Dick Jones: The Cosmos spiders leader. Cosmos, 1990, ISBN 3-440-06141-8
- Rainer F. Foelix: Biology of spiders. Thieme, Stuttgart 1979, ISBN 3-13-575802-8
- Norman I. Platnick, 2006. The World Spider Catalog, version 6.5. American Museum of Natural History.
- Theo glance, Robert Bosmans Jan Buchar, Peter Gajdoš, Ambros Hänggi, Peter Van Helsdingen, Vlastimil Růžička, Wojciech Staręga & Konrad Thaler, 2004. Checklist of the spiders of Central Europe. Checklist of the spiders of Central Europe. (Arachnida: Araneae). Version 1 December 2004.
- . Suresh P. Benjamin & Samuel Zschokke, 2004 Homology, behavior and spider webs: web construction behavior of Linyphia hortensis and L. triangularis ( Araneae, Linyphiidae ) and its evolutionary Significance. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 17: 120-130.