The Urban Pantheist

The presence of the jeweler's loupe here is a hint that this is a very small organism. We generally think of ants as small animals, but this species is the smallest I've ever seen. Each worker is just about 1 mm in length.


Their size and distinctive coloration--dark in the front with light legs and abdomen--identifies them as ghost ants Tapinoma melanocephalum*. Like many inhabitants of the great indoors, their origin is not precisely known. They are from the Old World Tropics for sure, narrowing it down to roughly a third of the surface of the planet.


A colony could form in a pile of dead leaves, or in between a plant pot and it's protective liner. As long as the place is warm and humid, the ghost ants can live happily, feeding on miniscule amounts of sweet things and dead insects. When a colony is successful, some amount of it departs to become a new colony--"budding" instead of the complex new colony creation that some other eusocial insects endure. Besides all the tropics and heated greenhouses in the world, ghost ants live in Florida and Texas, and appear to be spreading.

* Humble and dark-headed

Are we seeing a very productive mother, or the fourth generation of bug-eating cobweb-eaters to take up residence here? They are most likely hers--each female American house spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum* can produce several egg sacs, each of which may contain up to 400 eggs. Perhaps it's no wonder that this is one of the most widely distributed spiders in the world. In the great indoors, there isn't much more than other spiders, house centipedes, and the occasional cat that may prey on them. These globose predators make tangled cobwebs and eat a variety of household insects and other creatures, including cockroaches, flies, scorpions, and even animals larger than themselves.

*Nearby fatass in the warm house

Well this hasn't happened to me in a while. I found a new moth--indoors, of all places--and thought I'd check with the experts. Turns out it's something I should have known about, because it is a household pest. Despite my never have encountered it before, it's a well-known grain feeder called a meal moth Pyralis farinalis*. It's not the creature I call the grain moth (also known as the Indian meal moth, pantry moth, or pasta moth Plodia interpunctella**) which is a much smaller relative. Both species have larvae that feed on milled grain products, often with very disappointing results (in the eyes of the human owners of the grain products). Thanks to coolbugs for making the identification--and by the way, I haven't found any more (yet).



* Of fire, living in the flour

** Generic name Plodia apparently has no significance ("sans étymologie"), Specific epithet interpunctella is Latin meaning "well divided, pointed."

One of my favorite habitats is also one of my favorite tags: the great indoors. It may be humanity’s most distinctive invention—millions of more or less fully enclosed climate-controlled spaces, all within a few degrees of temperature and humidity from one another. Human movement and commerce links these spaces to one another—second hand furniture harbors a population of bedbugs, spiders move into milk crates used to store books, a fruit fly hatches in your house from an egg laid on a banana in a warehouse 500 miles away.

Most of these creatures enjoy the same range of temperatures that we do. Many will leave the indoors during favorable weather only to have their descendants move back in when it becomes inclement again. Some of the great indoors is warmer and more humid than humans prefer—greenhouses, boiler rooms, pet stores, and others. Here there may be flies and cockroaches from the African tropics. There is even a tropical mushroom that likes the great indoors.

The yellow flowerpot mushroom Leucocoprinus birnbaumii* thrives in rich warm moist soil, a habitat that describes most potted plants kept indoors. The fungus can’t survive a freeze, so temperate dwellers like myself have to wait for our houseplants to surprise us, rather than finding them outdoors. Plant-fancier message boards are cluttered with panicked queries about this species, whether it is killing the ficus or poisoning the jalapeños in the pot. This fungus causes no harm to the plants it shares habitat with, and the mushroom wilts away in hours after appearing. It should not be considered a serendipitous source of food—the mushroom is known to be toxic and ingesting it results in digestive symptoms.

*“Birnbaum’s colorless poop eater"

This hairy beast is just a baby. If it makes it to fully grown--and why wouldn't it, it has few predators and is well defended with prickly setae--it will metamorphose into a short blackish beetle with a tawny belt across its back. Both as an adult beetle and as an active larva, the larder beetle Dermestes lardarius* feeds on durable organic matter. This individual was found with many close relatives feeding on the mummy of long-dead mouse. Unlike the relative (Anthrenus verbasci) I covered earlier, larder beetles are almost always encountered indoors, the environment which provides shelter and food to them around the globe.


Aw look at the fuzzy little belly!

* "Skin eater in the larder"

I arrived at Alex's house, and she had just cleaned her way through the cobwebs of her basement bulkhead. I said "oh boy!" and went down to find the spiders. Most were cellar spiders, naturally. I did find, however, this lovely Steatoda triangulosa.* She's slightly different colors from the ones I've seen before, but the pattern is unmistakeable.

This is another species that probably came from Europe originally, but is so common both in Europe and North America that its not entirely clear. Unless my memory is wrong, it's also found in Australia with the apt common name "cupboard spider."

* I'm not kidding you when I report with some delight that the scientific name translates more or less to "Triangles on her fat ass."

There are a number of small dark globose spiders found in New England that have the misfortune of being confused with Lactrodectus (widow) spiders. None are dangerous, and like almost all spiders, rightly perceive humans as huge lumbering threatening beasts. When I tried to catch this one, she folded her legs against her body and held still, becoming a tiny tumbling football. When I was finally able to pick her up, she spent all of her time trying desperately to get away. This is one of the Steatoda* group of cobweb spiders, spiders which are not uncommonly found indoors. She may be S. grossa**, S. borealis***, or S. bipunctata****.


*Steatoda literally means “tallowy” in latinized Greek, but it is assumed that Sundevall was going for something more like “rotund or globose” (Cameron 2005).

** grossa means "big," or "big and plump" referring to the female's abdomen

*** borealis means "northern"

**** bipunctata means "two-spotted"

I have a feeling I'm getting to be known as one of those guys who tell you that a spider didn't bite you. The yellow sac spider Cheiracanthium sp. will always be known as the spider that bit my wife. If someone says they were bitten by a spider, I ask if they saw the spider. Almost no one says yes, but cottonmanifesto definitely did. It's extremely rare, but sometimes a spider will get trapped between your clothes and skin, and in a panic will sink its fangs in.

There are no spiders that want to bite humans (they gain nothing, they can not feed on us), not all spiders are physically capable of penetrating human skin, and in the rare case that they do bite, they generally "dry bite" meaning they hold back from injecting precious venom, a tool they need to successfully hunt. None of these facts made the welt on Alexis leg feel better, even after several weeks. Allergic reaction? Secondary bacterial infection? Hard to know. However the European species C. mildei (which is what we're probably looking at and discussing here, since they were found indoors) is very very common, and if it was capable of routinely causing medically significant envenomations, well let's just say New England might be renamed New Australia.