Identifier Profile: @ajott

This is the twentieth entry in an ongoing monthly (or almost monthly!) series profiling the amazing identifiers of iNaturalist.

“I was always fascinated by how things work and wanted to get to the bottom of things,” Dr. Anja Junghanns recalls when describing her childhood in Germany. 

When I was maybe 5 or 6 I was sure I was the first person to realize where mosquitoes come from. I had found some small wiggly critters in the rain barrel in our backyard and decided I needed to take a closer look, so I put them in jars and other translucent containers to observe them. I soon realized that they would change at some point into what my childish imagination termed “waterponies” (pupae) and was rather surprised to find mosquitoes later on in those closed containers. When I at some point was able to observe how one of those “waterponies” released a mosquito to the world I was in total awe (and maybe a bit disappointed to later find out that this was already common knowledge).

She’d also smash rocks with hammers to get at what was inside them (with protective goggles on, of course), consume nature documentaries, and was especially fascinated with arthropods and herps. “I was always especially interested in the parts of nature I had the least information about,” she explains.

Since joining iNaturalist a few years ago, Anja has identified over 76k spider observations, but says that “As an arachnophobic, diving into the spider world was actually a last resort for me.” She resided in a cool garden shed, but the downside is that it attracted “masses of large and hairy spiders each autumn and spring.” Feeling like she might have to move out due to the arachnids, she photographed these two spiders in 2010 and tried to identify them.

I still recall how disgusted I was by it and at the same time fascinated. It was also the moment I realized that it was easier for me to deal with spiders looking through the viewfinder of a camera.

I learned that the hunting spider in this observation (Scotophaeus) was actually my friend and would hunt down those huge hairy ones that I so despised. So I tried to learn to tolerate them. And it was all a slippery slope from there. I found more and more species in my tiny house and learned about their amazing hunting skills (Ero spiders, which while tiny are also spider hunters), their somehow lovely maternal behaviors (a lot of spider moms will protect their breed until death) and their impressive senses and other curiosities (like many spider males being basically mating machines only, often losing interest in basic surviving mechanisms like feeding).

So in 2012 she decided to study spiders for her thesis and ended up researching matriphagy in Stegodyphus spiders, along with some Danish and Israeli specialists. 

Matriphagy means that a spider mom will be eaten by her young before they disperse from their nest - a rather extreme and deadly behavior for the spider mom to secure their babies survival .. and which is connected to the extremely rare and therefore especially interesting case of social evolution in spiders (only about 25 spider species of about 55,000 known species today can be termed “social”). During my PhD I dug deeper and deeper into this topic which culminated into my thesis on “Evolution of Sociality: mechanisms and dynamics of social behavior in spiders”. To this day I am still in love with Stegodyphus spiders.

Anja and her partner have, for several years now, been living in different parts of the world and that included Ecuador in 2020, which is when she joined iNat because she wanted to learn about the unfamiliar wildlife she was encountering there. She initially started identifying observations here as a way of giving back to the community.

Websites like this do not function well if everybody just wants to get something out of it but not give back. It is basically how I learned to use and participate on the internet very early on…So the first months and years on iNat I tried to at least do 3 identifications for every observation I put on here. My interest in identifying spiked significantly since last year, as living in Bogotá does not allow me to take my camera out every day and observe a lot (for safety reasons and also as the capital itself is surprisingly low on insects unfortunately.). So identifying increasingly became an outlet to stay connected to nature. And I quickly started to fall in love with the dedicated, helpful and interactive spider identifier community here. Now identifying is a means for me to relax, connect and learn.

Having such a mobile lifestyle means that Anja doesn’t have a lot of physical references, so she generally uses online ones. 

For European spiders and their distribution there are some great websites I use to get species lists first (e.g. https://wiki.arages.de/ and https://araneae.nmbe.ch). The best source of spider information for worldwide endeavors is the World Spider Catalog. However, one needs to already have at least a bit of a clue about what genus one is interested in and can check distribution of individual species and scientific source material from there. When diving into a new taxa I will always try to go back to the scientific papers published on the taxa from there and will often through references in said papers dive deeper and deeper until I get a good understanding about how to distinguish a certain taxa or what other similar species to be aware of.

When I identify I will check my “usual suspects” (Stegodyphus, Argiope worldwide, Pisaurids in Europe and North America) first to keep up with them. If I still have more drive to ID after that, I decide what I am most interested in that day. Sometimes I pick a certain species in a certain place and will work through the “Needs ID” observations. Other times I feel like I want to push some of my own “needs ID” observations further and will dig into the topic of a certain taxon.. usually also ending up IDing for others, when I find out more about them. Sometimes I will quick and dirty go through Araneae worldwide and will often just be able to put it to family, sometimes genus. I enjoy how those “mental trips around the world” show me the amazing variety of our eight-legged friends.

Anja’s advice for taking spider photos:

Observing spiders can often be a bit disappointing, as it is often hard or impossible to ID them to species with typical observation photos. Many species (especially in many non-web building spiders) have sister species with near identical characteristics and can only be distinguished by observing the genital features as well - which is often impractical or impossible in the field. However, for cobweb builders I would always try to get a good shot from the ventral and dorsal side if possible. If you are lucky, the ventral shot is good enough to examine important features of the epigyne (the female genital region). Sometimes being able to clearly see certain hairs and bristles on the legs and palps of the spiders can make the difference between being able to go to species or having to stick with genus or complex. Habitat can also be an important information in some species. So taking some time to either take a photo that includes the habitat or give a description of it might make a difference (e.g. moist or try, forest or meadow, wilderness or around the house...)

Generally, I would advocate for a more relaxed approach to spider IDs.. it is fine to stick with genus sometimes and a lot of my own spider observation will never go to species ID as well.

Aaand some of Anja’s favorite spider taxa and observations:

• Stegodyphus spiders are just amazing. The South African Stegdyphus dumicola is one of only 20-something social spider species (out of more than 50,000 known spiders species so far) that live and hunt cooperatively.. those observations shows a nice aspect of it, where those relatively small spiders are able to overwhelm large or dangerous prey together: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319352,  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/71788845,  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/106786957 
• Spiders are also amazing at camouflage, which I always find very impressive, like camouflaging as bark, as parts of flowers, or bird poo. 
• I also admire their hunting methods from mimicking their own prey to hunting by swinging a glue drop to catch insects.- Some are just objectively beautiful: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/37680242, https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/50496754,  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/172517230,  https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=333585

- the first identifier profile was of @naufalurfi, another spider identifier!

- iNat was recently mentioned a few times in this article about the importance of documenting spiders, and how doing so can help people appreciate and like them more.

Posted on October 29, 2023 11:40 PM by tiwane