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| Site location |
During a quick business trip to Worcester, Massachusetts I took the opportunity to tap some fallen eastern white pine (
Pinus strobus) cones in their native range. Readers will recall that just one month prior, I had tapped the fallen cones of
P. strobus in
Green Lake Park in Seattle, Washington, where it is an introduced species. Little did I know on this day that I would be returning to Wachusett Reservoir one year later to conduct a
6-month survey of cone spiders there!
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| Sample site |
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| Understory thick with maple saplings |
My sample site was located at the edge of the pine-maple forest across the street from West Boylston's
Old Stone Church on Route 140 and the reservoir's Thomas Basin. The understory was so thick with maple saplings that I frequently got entangled in them. Only belatedly did I realized that poison ivy (
Toxicodendron radicans) was a major component of the groundcover. Lucky for me, it hadn't yet leafed out and I apparently didn't bruise any buds or woody stems, because I escaped without a rash.
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| The fallen cone microhabitat |
Since I had no net or pillow case with me, I improvised by tapping each cone with a stick over a white groundcloth. Tapping 65 cones, I collected 6 juvenile harvestmen and 5 juvenile spiders. One of the spiders was a
Phrurotimpus sp. (Phrurolithidae), a genus I'd later find during my
2012 survey to be one of the most common in Wachusett Reservoir cones.
Five juvenile spiders from 65 cones was not exactly an earth-shattering finding, but it was enough to put Massachusetts on the
World Map Of Pine Cone Spiders.
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