British Spiders

"Locket and Millidge is a very comprehensive identification guide for all the families of British spiders, and it covers the linyphiids as well. As a guide to using a microscope, this book is all we had until the 1990s. First of all, you’ve got to get it down to family. There’s a family key in it, but it takes a little while to become familiar with. Then you’ve got to get it down to the genus. In some cases, if you get to the family, you can get to the genus fairly easily because there’s only one genus in that particular family. For some spiders—like the jumping spiders—it’s dead easy to get to family, because of their eyes. They have a large pair of eyes at the front of their head, one on either side, and then four smaller eyes on the top of the head. “Any sort of habitat you come across, there’s likely to be a spider…They live everywhere” You’re looking at the arrangement of eyes, at the general shape of the animal under the microscope, the length of the legs and how the legs are positioned and so on and so forth. Over time, you gradually become familiar, and can say whether it’s a crab spider or a wolf spider (or whatever) just by the jizz of it. Then you’ve got to go and look at the smaller features like the male palps and the female epigyne. The opening on the underside of the female is sometimes quite obscure, even from the drawings. You can see that there are changes and differences between them. So one would be peering down the microscope trying to match what you were seeing with the line drawings in the book of the particular palps or the epigyne, which should take you to the species. Yes. Before I went on my course to Flatford, I managed to get hold of a copy, but I couldn’t make head or tail of it because it’s very, very difficult to go straight in. You’re presented with these pictures, but how do you get to that point? That was the difficulty. Going on a course helps you with those earlier stages, how to get to the stage where you’re looking at a palp in the book, and it’s matching or closely matching what you’re seeing under the microscope. It was quite a journey between picking a spider up to being able to say, ‘Well, that’s a particular type of wolf spider, and it’s that genus and that particular species.’ What is good about the book is that there’s a lot of descriptive information about the different parts of the spider. Not only the palps and the epigyne, but the colouring of it, particularly in large specimens and the shape of different parts of the body. There’s also quite a bit of information on the habitat and where you might find them. The third volume includes lots of distribution maps. I’ve got that one as well, but it was volumes one and two which were the most useful, getting the key to the families. People use keys in different ways. Once you become familiar with the families, then you often don’t need to bother with them. You can go straight in and say, ‘Okay, that’s a whatever.’ But even after all this time—after all these years of experience that I’ve had—I occasionally come across a spider and wonder what family it belongs to. Then you’ve got to go back to basics again and go through the process. This one or the following one, which is the M J Roberts."