Elongated

Click to enlarge.

While wandering the banks and bed of upper Bull Creek on April 26th I photographed a colony of wild onions (Allium canadense var. canadense), on one stalk of which I found this svelte spider. I later turned to Joe Lapp for an identification and he said it’s an adult male in the genus Tetragnatha, which belongs to the family of long-jawed orbweavers. I hope you’re slack-jawed enough over how stretched out this spider is that you’ll long remember its similarly elongated pastel portrait. (And I hope you will despite the fact that arachnophobia ranks among the most common of all human fears, presumably because various spiders around the world are venomous, even lethally so).

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman