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Bush Spider
Cambridgea foliata
Cambridgea foliata (common name, New Zealand sheet-web spider) is a species of Desidae spider endemic to New Zealand. These nocturnal, arboreal spiders are distributed throughout the North Island of New Zealand and build large horizontal sheet-webs with a large number of knock-down threads....
From the article Cambridgea foliata on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Description
C. foliata have a reddish-brown cephalothorax and greyish yellow abdomen. While males and females of this species are of a similar size with a cephalothorax width of approximately 5.8mm, males have significantly longer chelicerae compared to females. While males of other Cambridgea species possess a stridulatory organ on the dorsal surface of the pedicel and abdomen, it is absent in male C. foliata.
Range & habitat
This species is only known from the North Island and the north end of the South Island of New Zealand.
Wikipedia: “Distribution”
What it does
In the summer season, mature males depart their natal webs in search of females, sometimes wandering into people's houses'. When they find a female's web, they will use their first pair of legs and chelicerae to defend the web and female from any other males which may intrude, with the largest males tending to be most successful at defending webs.
Wikipedia: “Contest behaviour”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Cambridgea foliata in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 387056.