No surprise: Spiders like insect buffets

Field courses run by the Organization for Tropical Studies are generally intense research experiences. It has been a little over a week, and I've already completed one project and am making my way well through a second. Our first project out here was a faculty field project (FFP), led by Nacho, our class TA. Nacho's a Costa Rican (a tico) who specializes in spiders, so our first project was to investigate (you guessed it!) spiders.

The spiders we studied are Peucetia viridans, a type of lynx spider. For those not versed in scientific names, they are generally italicized, because they are in latin. The first part is the genus name- there are lots of species in a genus usually, and they have a lot in common with each other. The second part is the species name, and together the genus and species name make up a unique binomial for that species. Anyways- that was a tangent. I'll just refer to it as the green lynx spider which is the common name.

The lynx spiders associate generally with plants that have a lot of trichomes, which are little hairs on the leaves that can make the leaves sticky. The sticky leaves help trap insects, which the spider eats. We surveyed all of the plants we could find, to figure out why some plants have spiders and others don't.

A lynx spider female defending her plant.

Basically, spiders liked plants with more insects on them- they like to live somewhere with something to eat. No real surprises with that one!