Tetragnatha

 Tetragnatha

The title of this blog entry is the name of a genus of spiders. I knew nothing about this genus until a chance encounter in iNaturalist. This is a story less about the spider and more about a website.

Tetragnatha sp., Long-jawed Orb Weaver, Santa Fe, NM, summer 2016

It was a hot morning in August of 2016 when we strolled beside the Rio Santa Fe in New Mexico, with friends looking for dragonflies and maybe an early migrating bird. We saw a rare Shadow Darner in this rather beautiful rocky canyon southwest of the city. Surprisingly, the location is not frequently visited, despite the coolness of the permanent water here (a continuous stream being released from the sewage treatment plant several miles above). After noting several other ode species, my attention turned to this spider.

Not much to look at, truthfully, but it had a nice large web beside the creek. I am completely untutored in spiders. I don't have a clue what to even look for. So I posted my photo on my site at iNaturalist.org and waited hopefully.

This website is, hands down, the most amazing invention of the internet for admirers of the natural world. I post every photo I can there, and others come along later and help me identify the creature. Millions of creatures have been identified in this manner, and since you must also post the exact location, the site is helping biologists learn the range margins of countless species. Some determined biologists have even used the photos to discover new subspecies and previously unknown disjunct populations. Reportedly, one entirely new species has even been discovered this way. Of all the (many) things I aspired to do in retirement, populating iNaturalist with species data was at the top of the list.

So the spider? It was identified (Tetragnatha) 7 years later! By a spider expert who I have never heard of -- who lives in Italy! There is no more wonderful mechanism to connect naturalists together. In this age of global threats to wildlife species, iNaturalist might well be our last best hope to understand the biosphere before we chew it up, extract our humanly needs, and spit it out, used and defiled. If it had existed in a prior age, iNaturalist could have helped us to understand the ranges of endangered species, using a mechanism that is lightning fast and crowd-sourced by millions of observers, as compared to the old, plodding ecological literature. (Don't get me wrong: literature is important, but cannot distill even a tiny fraction of the information that iNaturalist is capable of.)

(A side note about spider ID. Many individuals can only be identified to Genus, not to Species. These guys are an especially difficult challenge, unless you can study them under a microscope. The Genus that I photographed has the comical common name of Long-jawed Orb Weaver.)

As of today, iNaturalist.org has documented details of an incredible 420,000 species all across the world. Two and a half million people have participated in this record keeping. Every spot on earth is in the atlas, from the shores of Antarctica to the Arctic Sea. For myself, my list on the site consists of 306 species. I have gotten identification help from Brazilians, Thais, eastern Europeans, South Americans, Central Americans, and more. I have species data for 8 countries: which is to say that I have only scratched the surface. With the help of this international team of professional biologists and amateur naturalists, most of whom I will sadly never get to meet, I have documented frogs, toads, butterflies, mammals, a fungus, moths, snakes, salamanders, slugs, bats, whales, shrubs, trees, wildflowers, bugs of many types, and ants. I have posted both photos and audio recordings. These have come from the driveway in front of my house to mountains half way around the world.

In my household (and I suspect in yours), there are hours and hours of conversation about what we should be doing to save the world. Recycling, turning down the winter thermostat, growing herbs and vegetables, electric cars and solar panels. All good things. But none of them can beat the power of iNaturalist.org in making available information, very detailed information about where the critters are, where they have been, and what they are doing. So we better understand how to save them.

Shadow Darner in Santa Fe. A hard-to-find dragonfly.
I usually get these identified at the equally helpful website
odonatacentral.org, which operates in a similar fashion.

Checkered Whiptail in Santa Fe. Identified at iNaturalist.org

Differential Grasshopper, common in New Mexico.
Identified at iNaturalist.org and also at bugguide.net.

Red-spotted Newt, in our woods in Vermont.
Identified at iNaturalist.org