We were at Lambir Hills National Park for the last week, without Internet connectivity -- hence the blog going dark. In past decades, doing field work in tropical rainforests always meant being entirely disconnected from the rest of the world. We would reemerge not knowing whether Canada had sunk into the sea.
With fond recollection of those old days, I enjoyed this week's peaceful isolation. We did appreciate, however, Lambir's modern perks of electricity, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing.
At Lambir we found many of the same species as we had at Mulu, but some, like these delicate Orthrus, we hadn't seen before. The female is translucent green, making her almost invisible on the undersides of palm fronds in the forest, where they live. The male is bigger (this is rare in spiders) and sports a striking black head and first pair of legs.
Now that I'm Internet-reconnected, I'll have more posts over the next several days.
Previously in this series:
Spiders in Borneo: Introduction
Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity
Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae
Spiders in Borneo: Team Salticid
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu National Park
Spiders in Borneo: Dreaming about salticid spiders
Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spiders in the forest
Spiders in Borneo: Beating around the bushes
Spiders in Borneo: Spiders in leaf litter
Spiders in Borneo: A Vertical Life
Spiders in Borneo: Leeches and eyeballs
Spiders in Borneo: Breaking News!
Spiders in Borneo: Falling from above
Spiders in Borneo: What I carry
Spiders in Borneo: Entangled and pierced
Spiders in Borneo: Scattered literature
Spiders in Borneo: Mulu wrap-up
Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY)
