First public presentation, at 2008 American Arachnological Society, of LinEpig, an online gallery to help museums identify spiders in the Linyphiidae family. This huge family of minute spiders includes the only North American spiders with no key to genus. LinEpig utilizes social features of Google's "Picasa" image-sharing software to deliver taxonomic and geolocation data.
Hi. My name is Nina Sandlin. I’m an associate at the Field Museum in Chicago.
And I’d like to show you some very preliminary imaging I’ve been doing of female erigonines.
This is my friend Elizabeth, who is a spider enthusiast. She was sorting some Hahniidae, and one day I get an email from her with some pictures.
They were beautiful. And she said she had shot them just by pointing her digital camera through the eyepiece.
Right away, I thought of Linyphiidae.
The family Linyphiidae is a very large family of very tiny spiders. A lot of them are only a couple of millimeters long. And a lot of them look alike. “Linyphiidae is a large, poorly known, and taxonomically difficult family.”
I happened to have a problem linyphiid on hand. Mike Draney had identifed bunch of them from our Swalllow Cliff study as Agyneta barrowsi. But we only had females, and the details of their anatomy were hard to make out.
For members of the public who are here tonight: As you may know, spiders are identified by their reproductive organs, which on the female is that little bit that I’ve colored in bright yellow, called the epigynum. So on a 2-millimeter long spider, that is not a large area.
The epigynum looked kind of like a cloudy, translucent airbag with a central strut.
When we compared it to the figure in the original species description, we could see a lot more detail in the photo. And that gave me hope…
Because a lot of Linyphiidae are a good deal smaller than Agyneta barrowsi. And they are not as well documented.
When you get to the erigonines in the “Spiders of North America,” it just says “males only.”
What we use instead of a key is “the flip-books” – which are big three-ring binders of photocopies, where Mike Draney has collected all the figures from the original literature.
This is what I shot Agyneta barrowsi with, steadied against a rolled-up file folder, leaning on the scope.
And this is what we’re using now.
And since these specimens are so small that Brownian motion will jiggle them, we try to minimize vibration any way we can. ... And here’s some images.
Eperigone maculata has this very striking epigynum that’s like the flaring nostrils of an angry bull.
And you can see that this was meant to be the same structure.
Eridantes erigonoides in both the male and female has a narrow lobe in the head region with two eyes on top. And the epigynum has this flask shape, with almost a Schizocosa-like inverted-T structure.
You can’t quite make out the inverted T in the figure.
Hypselistes florens males have a remarkable bulbous head that is constricted “at the temples.” The females have this heavily sclerotized epigynum…
… which we can see some of the features of in the figure. … Now if it sounds like I’m making fun of Crosby and Bishop, I’m really not.
... because, as Mike noted here and elsewhere, they did a great job compared with most everybody else.
Tapinocyba simplex has a yellow shiny raised cephalothorax with small silver eyes. The epigyna even “from a distance” have a distinctive (inverse |||| ) pattern.
... which the figure is a little too curvy to really capture
People say the Erigone epigyna all look alike. We have not imaged many yet, this will be a good test.
We do have a few Spiremboluses. ... So what I’ve been doing is posting these things online.
There’s lots of photo-sharing sites out there, like Flickr, Snapfish and Shutterfly. But it turns out that anyone with a Gmail address already has a Google Picasa account built in, so I just started there.
My Picasa album is called LinEpig, and here’s the album cover. When you click on a thumbnail ...
... it brings up the big image, along with its information. You can add Tags, so I put in both the spider’s names, as well as Linyphiidae, Erigoninae, and “epigynum.”
The Tags and Captions are searchable. A search for “epigynum” for example, will bring up photos and notes from LinEpig and from Efrat Gavish’s albums of Israeli linyphiids. And of course if you post any images that to Picasa with that word in the tags or title, it will get those as well.
There is a “Map location” link that lets you put in where photo was taken (or where the specimen was collected).
Here you can practically see the very pitfall trap in Swallow Cliff Woods that our spider came from.
Basically, it’s a usable tool with relatively low barrier to entry.
We’re going to try some simple compositing. We welcome your thoughts on any ways of improving the images that aren’t prohibitively labor-intensive. And we would like to expand the album. So if you have any reliably identified Erigoninae females ...
And just to get you in the mood, here are species where photos would help.