Gea heptagon
(Heptagonal Orb-weaver)

I’m learning that orb weaver taxonomy is more complicated than I thought., There are spiders in a few families that make orb webs. Yours is unusual, it has a cephalothorax like some Aranidae, but the abdomen looks like Theridiidae. The families that have species that make orb webs are: Aranidae, Tetragnathidae, Uloboridae, and Arkyidae. I’ve never heard of the last one, it was broken off from Aranidae. Some of them do what you described, they have a tiny orb web within a bigger supporting web. Tetragnathidae do that. I’ll add one of my photos of a Long-jawed orbweaver with a… Read more »

I looked into the art aspect of your ideas for the site. Itsy Bitsy said the site used to have art. Pinterest has lots of spider art. My network programmer relative discussed the flexibility of a site like this with me. He said we can’t change the format without access to the hosting server and if we can’t maintain contact with the Site Administrator, nothing significant can change without transferring the site piece by piece to a new host..That’s not a thing we would want to do. The best opportunity for expansion would be to create an entirely new website… Read more »

Thanks for answering. It has only been two years since the site changed over to Spider ID (with about 40 species!). You have done a great job building up the site in such a short time period! Especially considering that it wasn’t expected or programmed to be what it has become! I’ll chill out if you want to keep it the same and the site administration is still involved and has our content protected. Thank you for your hard work!