At the beginning of August, I spend a week on Madeira doing field work. Madeira is a relatively small isolated oceanic island in the North Atlantic, 400 km north of the Canary Islands, with a subtropical climate. It was an amazing place to do field work with a large number of endemic plants and animals. I was there with a former student of mine – Daniel Simonsen – and a collaborator Darko Coteras on a BES funded small research grant granted to Darko to study the habitat and webs of the endemic spider Meta stridulans. This spider is very interesting as this is the only spider in the genus Meta known not to live in caves. Thus, it would be interesting to know if this spider shows the same modified webs without frame threads that we found in the cave spider Meta menardi.
We are still analysing the findings, but it is clear that Meta stridulans is very versatile in its habitat and we found it in the laurasilva forest, on cliff edges and above small streams and artificial water channels (levadas). It was particular common in dark and humid areas and we did also find a couple of spiders in the mouths of tunnels and caves (but not deeper in, so clearly different from the other European cave spiders Meta menardi and Meta bourneti). Its webs were also large, more complex and in almost all cases complete with a full set of frame threads.
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