Comments & ID Thoughts
This spider was photographed in Zimbabwe, it's comfortable in water or may be some kind of water spider. The plastic box is a 1 litre ice cream container (for scale).
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Mar 25, 2018
- Photographed: Mar 25, 2018
- Spider: Pisauridae (Nursery Web Spiders)
- Location: Harare, Zimbabwe
- Spotted Outdoors: Freshwater river, lake, stream
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes: Dorsal
Hi, welcome to Spider ID. 🙂 This looks like a Nursery Web or Fishing Spider (Pisauridae). There are several similar looking genera in the family … this looks pretty close to some Dolomedes and I see one (D. smithi) listed for “East Africa”, unfortunately I have no images of it to compare to so I don’t know if that’s right or if I need to investigate the other genera further.
Thanks very much – and that sounds right, given that it is often found in water. Interestingly, I can only find Dolomedes furcatus (https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species/27293) in Mozambique and Dolomedes angolensis in Angola (https://wsc.nmbe.ch/species/27269), but nothing in Zimbabwe specifically.