It seems I’m remembering other people’s mentions of a paper, and not the paper itself. Actually I think what I read was this blog post, which turns out just to be copying wikipedia, which turns out to need citation on the fact in question. After some digging, the paper that blinded the spiders with paint was Weigel, 1941, which is nearly 80 years old and in German to boot, so definitely not something I’ve actually read. Wikipedia does link a fun (and long) review about spider color. Seems I’m also miss-remembering the speed of color change: “The process of turning from white to yellow takes between 10 and 25 days, and the reverse change, 5 to 6 days.”
Disclaimer here: I’m a plant person, who sometimes falls down flower-related rabbit holes. I don’t actually know anything about spiders and should probably refrain from spreading incorrect facts about them!
Would be great if you could start such a project for your region as well!
After that, in an umbrella project those two projects could then be combined.
@ all, but particularly @carnifex
It’s an extremely large project you describe since most arthropod and fungi observations will ultimately be related to a plant species. For almost 2 years I’ve been running a project which tracks flora & fauna associated with cassava (Manihot esculenta). The most difficult part is that it’s not common practice to make note of the non-target plant the ID observation was found on. that makes it quite difficult to gather observations since they are often zoomed too close to ID the plant. Just wanted to share that experience.
@naufalurfi if you happen to make any observations of animal, fungi, plant, disease in or on cassava please feel free to contribute. I am based in Laos & a lot of my observations are for Southeast Asia. There are roughly 5 million hectares of cassava in the region at the moment, so lots of possiblity for sightings.