Spider Find Makes the News (Heliophanus tribulosus)
I was pleasantly surprised to have local news reach out to me to do a article on a recent interesting jumping spider I found in Alderney while I was visiting last week. The spider is Heliophanus tribulosus, and was last recorded in Alderney in 2004 when multiple adults were found at a location. H. tribulosus is not found in the UK which made it the first spider I have found in the Channel Islands that cannot be found in the UK it is also my first jumping spider of 2022 so quite a good one to get as a first of the year! I found the spider under a stone on the cliffs, there was a pile of stones sloping down a bank and I thought ‘that’s a good place to look for spiders’ it was quite a windy day so I quickly put a few spiders I found into some tubes and took them home to be identified. When I got home and realized one of the spiders was not a Heliophanus I had seen before I had a look at it under the microscope to see what it really was as to identify some spiders you need to look at them under the microscope to be able to see small details you can’t always make out with the naked eye. After getting some picture of the details needed I was thinking it was H. tribulosus but wanted to be sure and confirm with some of the people on the British Spider Identification Group on Facebook and they confirmed my thoughts were correct!
We get other species of Heliophanus more commonly found like Heliophanus flavipes and Heliophanus cupreus which can often be seen on a sunny day hunting for prey on vegetation or stones. Heliophanus can be quite easy to get to genus as they often have yellow/light green pedipalps (the two appendages on the front of their face), a pale band on the front of their abdomen and normally have an overall metallic sheen to them. Very cute little spiders!
