Complete Guide To The Long-Bodied Cellar Spider

Long-Bodied Cellar Spider Notes

• Cellar Spiders have adapted quite nicely to human activity. They live in dark, quiet corners within buildings—especially cellars and basements.
• As members of the Space Web Building group of spiders commonly living in buildings, Cellar Spiders are primarily responsible for creating the classic “cobwebs” found in buildings.
  • These spiders build complicated, three-dimensional webs that appear disorganized. The strands overlap and fill the space seemingly at random.
  • Individual spiders hang upside down within the tangles until they sense prey.
    • Despite their extremely long, thread-like legs, they move easily through their webs.
• Cellar Spiders are capable of successfully attacking much larger prey than themselves, including other spiders—even fellow Cellar Spiders.
  • Individual spiders often leave their own webs and actively hunt residents in others.
  • In the wild, wasps pose the biggest natural threat to Cellar Spiders (Bradley 2012).
• Like some other spiders, especially the Orb Weaver Spiders, Cellar Spiders use sticky webbing to capture prey. But unlike the orbweavers, Cellar Spiders turn their silk into an active weapon, rather than a passive trap.
  • Cellar Spiders approach prey to within a few body lengths, then draw sticky silk from their spinnerets with their long, thin front legs, and throw the strands at the prey.
  • They repeat this process until the prey is completely tangled and unable to fight back. Only then do the spiders approach, bite the prey, inject venom, and settle down to feed.
• Cellar Spiders shake their webs violently when threatened to send themselves swinging in wild, rapid circles. This makes them nearly invisible and extremely hard to attack.
  • They continue this behavior for several minutes after any disturbance. But strangely, the movement doesn’t seem to effect their coordination after they stop gyrating.
• The Long-Bodied Cellar Spider Pholcus phalangioides may be the most abundant North Carolina spider species in genus Pholcus. But another species, Pholcus manueli, also inhabits the state.
  • Pholcus manueli are smaller overall.
  • However, the two species are direct competitors because P. manueli behaves similarly to P. phalangioides, including how and where they build their webs.
  • P. manueli spiders in close proximity to larger P. phalangioides spiders risk not only being eaten, but risk being displaced from their webs by force as well.
    • In a study that researched the role direct competition can play in whether P. manueli can establish itself in areas already inhabited by P. phalangioides, adult female P. phalangioides spiders won all competitions against adult female P. manueli, including:
      • Thirteen out of 20 trials for empty web sites.
      • Twelve trials for sites with already established P. phalangioides webs.
      • Twelve trials for sites with already established P. manueli webs (Campbell, Salazar, and Rypstra 2020, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02216-6).