The burned lands are in the foothills of Rancho Cucamonga, CA. They are about 1 mile south of the San Bernardino National Forest, which means judicious collecting should be perfectly legal The burned lands are surrounded by classic SoCA chaparral, but themselves have a slightly more moist character, likely due to being located in a small east-west valley thereby having some northern exposure slopes. The reason i decided to call this area the Burned Lands is because they were badly burned in one of the large SoCA wildfires in something like 2004-2006. For a while it was fairly grim looking, but now the evidence of the fires has to be looked for and does not hit you over the head. Happily, the bugs and other animals that were burrowers seem to have survived the fires quite well
Here are a couple pictures of one of the large ~glade type areas that along with the slopes of the valley make up the bulk of the area i have explored.
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My primary method of hunting (as generally is the case) is flipping. I am moderately short sighted and thus somewhat of a natural flipper. Since the BL can really dry out during the summer anytime you flip rocks it is important to "resocket" as well as possible or they lose a lot of value to the animals that live and hide under them. I usually try to flip rocks that appear relatively flat on the bottom, but sometimes i get tricked and end up flipping a rock that is fairly deeply socketed. Once i start a rock moving i make every effort to flip it without rocking it back and forth, as you can easily crush whatever animals might be located underneath it. I pulled a medium deep seated rock and saw an interesting chamber built into the now exposed side wall.
Fairly common in parts of SoCA are Phidippus jumping spiders. During spring they can often be found guarding and maintaining eggsacs or their younglings, as this spider was. Once i noticed the babies with this female i carefully returned everything to as near original position as possible.
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When i was a kid i liked most bugs... but a few gave me the willies. Probably second on that list (just after some cockroaches) were potato bugs/jerusalem crickets/ninos de la tierra. Their vaguely human facial features and large size make them offputting to me, for some reason. Nowadays i love and respect these guys... those kick thorns on their back legs have drawn blood from me on at least one occasion There seem to be a number of different colors and sizes around SoCA. This large orange fellow was a decent representative of the size i was finding on this particular day. (youtube link to come)
And now on to the arachnids
Since i have decided to move out of CA, it seems that nature has decided to show me what i am going to be missing Prior to the day of this hunt, i had seen something like 3 of these cool looking little guys. Morphological cousins to uropygi and solifugae are the Schizomida. (does anyone else think about trying a microhabitat stocked with schizies, palpigradi, pseudoscorpions, land shrimp, termites, etc?)
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One of my favorite things to learn about and look for are mini-mygalomorphae. Dwarf tarantulas are awesome and some of the other myg families have even smaller members. Possibly the smallest species in CA is a Mecicobothriidae known as Hexurella rupicola... and i think i found evidence of them in the BL Look how similar the carapace of this molt looks to the carapace of another Meci' genus, Microhexura (which is not found in CA, i believe) --> http://images.google.com/images?h...icrohexura&btnG=Search+Images zoom
Sometime in ~2006-2007 i found some spider poo sign and recovered an imbedded "sock" (the web lining of a myg burrow) with an inside diameter of ~3/4" or ~2cm). Despite looking and looking... and looking... and bringing people to help me look i never found anything but evidence of mygs... never the mygs themselves. Well, the dry spell was ended on the day of this hunt! While i was tryign to suss out what i thought was a Hex spider i actually came across what is probably another species (and family, actually). I had flipped a rock and found what i think/hope to be Hex webbing attached to a bunch of leaf and twig litter on the bottom of the rock.... but then found what looked to be uncapped myg burrows.... first two within 4"/10cm of each other and eventually quite a few ranging in inside diameter from just a couple of mm all the way to almost half an inch/12mm! I decided to excavate the pair of holes i found first and ended up recovering THREE spiders!
the smaller hole yielded a very small spider, on the order of a few mm legspan...
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but i managed to find the terminus of a different burrow when i pulled the smaller original hole and bagged a ~1"/2.5cm legspan spider.
Here you can see the terminus of the third spider (in zoom it is the burrow with the single yellow ring. the green arrow points to what might be an ejected molt or a raggedy food bolus. the double yellow circle is the larger hole i was following. the hole seemed to have a midpoint veiling, which can be seen in the pic. the midpoint veil was awesome cuz it kept the hole from getting filled as i dug it up)
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And the larger original hole held a slightly larger spider yet! One thing i have noticed in just about every one of these type of spider holes i have excavated (which is ~6 now, with the first three holes either being empty or containg a spider better at hiding than i am at finding) is that the burrows don't seem to have a strong terminal bulb as the Ctenizidae (true trapdoor spiders) seem to. This might facilitate spiders escaping out a sort of backdoor, depending on the exact type of soil mixture they are burrowed into. I have never found one of these burrow types to have ANY kind of a door at all. The first burrow i found (by scat sign) had something like an long (well, 4-6 times as long as the inside diameter) ungrounded foyer. These most recent burrows i found have what appears to be either very short turrets or no enterace features at all. It is defintely possible that i have been finding burrrows of more than one species, as you will see later in this post zoom zoom zoom
This was the largest uncapped burrow enterance i found on this hunt
An important note about these spiders: This spider could belong to the genus Apomastus. If this is the case then this species could be suffering from habitat loss and should not really be collected in great numbers until this question of quantity can be satisfactorily answered. I personally feel like the perceived paucity is more likely a result of a lack of surveyors rather than an actual large downturn in species numbers. I suspect that there are many, many places (like this one) that have many Apomastus in it, but just haven't been identified to the scientific community. BUT... they really could be in a bad way, and until we have good evidence to the contrary we should collect virtually none of these little dudes.
A DAY OF BONUSES!!!
So, if i can manage to get the little vids i shot to stop crashing my computer i will post the actual discovery of this spider... but in short, i flipped over a large (>1 foot square) rock and saw a medium Scolopocryptops giant blind centipede (~2.5"/6cm body length) dart under the centrally located triangule shaped rock. i decided to shoot me flipped the triangle rock, as i have very little footage of me actually finding stuff. WELL, little did i know what i was about to shoot In order to more safely flip the triangle rock i went to move the rectangular rock that is on the right side of the triangle rock... and stupidded up a very large and pretty myg! this spider has a 1.5" to a 2" legspan zoom zoom youtube (lofi) youtube (hifi) _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
William S. Burroughs The Western Lands
Last edited by cacoseraph on Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:39 am; edited 2 times in total
in addition to something like ~10 fried ccd elements i also forgot to bring a magnifying glass so all my pics were not up to snuff. plus, normally i take like 15 pics for every one i publish and on this trip i barely took any. aaand... something else is wrong with my cam... the vids i shot kill windows explorer when i try to open them. i can open them from a media player... but they are poison to explorer.
i'm probably going to go back to the site soon to try to find the putative/hopeful Mecico's _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
Andrew, next friday im up for going out there.. _________________ “Look down at me and you see a fool;
look up at me and you see a god;
look straight at me and you see yourself.”
I have just requested Friday off, given that I don't have to flake out I would love to tag along. Don't worry Andrew, I'll take the pics of you flipping rocks barehanded :p _________________ God does not play at dice AE
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
Looks like a dried fungus that something bored into and called it home.... _________________ “Look down at me and you see a fool;
look up at me and you see a god;
look straight at me and you see yourself.”
Looks like a dried fungus that something bored into and called it home....
_________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
Yup, that's the one. Was it a rock? we better swing by tehre again, I'd love some pictures of it. It is amazing you can find such engravings without stupid tagging on them yet. Betcha it used to be some sort of ceremonial rock of sacrifice where the blood offering would spill through all the semi-co centric circles, the holes must be in order to collect pools of ... ummm, I've given away too much
j/k _________________ God does not play at dice AE
we can sure go to take more pictures of this thing
rock: colder/coldest
fungus: cold/warm
things burrowing: did in fact make the holes
Click to see full size image
this is my new desktop background _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
only other thing that comes to mind is a burnt log?
this is basically it.
Click to see full size image
Click to see full size image
it is found inside a giant burned out hulk of an oak tree. the tree was probably almost 6 feet in diameter on it's long axis and 4' on it's short access. the piece in the original picture is probably something like 6" by 10" or something. the largest black hole is maybe 1cm across, iirc
the tree is in a section of hill that i want us to examine for bugs of interest _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
That was a fungus that got burned with the tree... See I was right. _________________ “Look down at me and you see a fool;
look up at me and you see a god;
look straight at me and you see yourself.”
yeah, i don't actually know what it is... fungus or wood would be the two best guesses
it's pretty, whatever it is _________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
Good guess Warren. Burnt log. It looks like it could be a log, but the fact this place is the Burnt lands sort of gave it away _________________ God does not play at dice AE
i hope this is Hexurella rupicola... it would be mature and probably a female. there is a chance there could be a Hexura fulva, in which case it is only about half grown. i will get more pics eventually to try to show size better
_________________
Quote:
There may be people who like centipedes. I have seen people handling tarantulas and scorpions, but never a centipede handler. I would regard such a person with deep suspicion...Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on its underbelly "And here is my big good centipede." If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race.
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The burned lands are surrounded by classic SoCA chaparral, but themselves have a slightly more moist character, likely due to being located in a small east-west valley thereby having some northern exposure slopes. The reason i decided to call this area the Burned Lands is because they were badly burned in one of the large SoCA wildfires in something like 2004-2006. For a while it was fairly grim looking, but now the evidence of the fires has to be looked for and does not hit you over the head. Happily, the bugs and other animals that were burrowers seem to have survived the fires quite well 
