northeast-flora-and-fauna

For Throwback Thursday, this is one of our biggest and most prominent orbweaver spiders, a Yellow Garden Spider I met back in 2020 [1]. I actually wanted to link to a post of these large spiders when I was talking about the much smaller Bold Jumping Spider a couple days back, only to realize I hadn't posted about them here [2]! Doing a Throwback Thursday post was the quickest way to remedy this deficiency in the blog. These are 1 of our biggest spiders and are also among our most prominent with their black-and-yellow coloring. While you can get eyestrain looking at a lot of our orbweavers (e.g. Basilica Orbweaver , Marbled Orbweaver , Orchard Orbweaver ), the Yellow Garden Spider is comparably a cinch to spot and ID. Although all spiders are somewhat venomous, the Yellow Garden Spider's venom isn't especially potent. It's generally considered about as bad and dangerous as a bee sting. It's been theorized their black-and-yellow color is an example of aposematism , ...

Most of the time when you see a slightly large orange butterfly with black "veins" in NJ, you're seeing a Monarch . But not all the time. Every once in a while you could be seeing a Viceroy  (this this guy). While they look quite similar, there is an excellent field mark to tell the difference. There's a dark line that parallels the back wing; see the circled blue in the 2nd picture. Though both the Viceroy and the Monarch look similar and can be found nectaring on flowers, their lives also have important differences. As you've probably heard by now Monarch caterpillars eat poisonous milkweed plants and become poisonous themselves as a result. Something similar happens with Viceroys, but as caterpillars they eat trees in the willow family , absorb salicylic acid from the trees, and become somewhat poisonous themselves. This is why their relationship with Monarch is now considered to be Mullerian mimicry , where both species benefit from looking like one another. ...