I was amazed to see a field of shiny dots in the scrub behind our house at night near De Mond Nature Reserve.
At first I thought it was glow worms but on closer inspection saw that they were the eyes of a sheet web spider reflecting the light of my LED head lamp. Has anyone experienced this before?
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Some spiders have a lot of eyeshine - in my experience wolf spiders have really bright green eyeshine and they can be all over the ground at night. I have no experience with sheet web spiders but I assume spiders which are visual night hunters would be the ones with the brightest eyeshine.
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Several spiders do seem to have large shineback. Locally (In my part of NZ) the dolomedes (Water spiders) I can often guess its one of them from quite a distance, like in the past from on top of a swing bridge before going down on the bank and finding it. Many arachnids also glow under UV (Some completely some not at all), but this vagrant spider shows how glowy eyes can sometimes be under UV, and shows how some reflecting works. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/97333820
Generally our sheetwebs I havent noticed to be so reflective. Mostly its active hunters (Prowlers, or ambush) which seem to have the most reflective eyes for me.
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eye shine is one way of finding spiders, especially wolf spiders and fishing spiders. Its suggested as a way of finding spiders at night by both Kasten and Levi in their field guides.
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Welcome to the forum @jenfin7
I remember night lighting in De Hoop Nature Reserve and how remarkable it was to find out that the bright light that was shining back was spider eyes in the grass - they don’t blink.
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In Sumatra’s Gunung Leuser National Park at night, sometimes there were so many spiders that it felt like walking among stars. Amazing! Mostly huntsman spiders I think.
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I love it: spiders are everywhere!
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When I was in Costa Rica the first time I was going out at night barefoot to look at things and just kind of vaguely noticed although the grass was sparkly like at home in the temperate evenings my feet weren’t getting wet. Days later I was shining my light across a patch of grass with a much wiser local person and commented on the sparkles and she said something about the spiders’ eyes. Shudder does not begin to describe my reaction, but I quickly got over it.
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I don’t remember seeing spiders much on Sumatra but I do remember the Huntsman on the path post at Gunung Mulu, Malaysian Borneo, while night lighting - so much we are missing during the day light. Those spiders are huge - we also found one inside our bed netting… too big to deal with so I just left it alone… I would rather have it than what it was going to be feeding on inside our netting…
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