Spider on Texas groundsel

In many places along the highways in Llano County on April 7th I saw colonies of Texas groundsel, Senecio ampullaceus, some flowers of which provided the background color in the previous photograph. When I took a close look at a few opening buds of that species on TX 71 about 10 miles east of Llano, I noticed this elongated spider from the family Philodromidae and the genus Tibellus (thanks to Joe Lapp for the identification). The made-up name Philodromidae means ‘loves to run,’ and this spider did move around on the opening buds to avoid a close encounter with my macro lens, but to say it ran might be an exaggeration—or else you could consider it poetic license of the arachnid kind.

The contrasting color in the background this time is from some of the many Texas bluebonnets, Lupinus texensis, that were flowering in even more places than the groundsel.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman