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| Megabunus diadema habitat, Craig y Llyn |
Unfortunately it had already started raining at this point and the photo below was the best I could do. It doesn't show the fantastic spines on the eye turret, but I had a good look at these through my hand lens. There's a great photo showing the eye turret here.
My MapMate copy shows only 3 records in Glamorgan, all from the north of the county and within about 10km of Craig y Llyn. This seems strange as the national distribution map on the Spider Recording Scheme website has plenty of records from lowland southern England.
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| Glamorgan distribution inc. Craig y Llyn record (from my copy of MapMate, so probably incomplete) |
Very nice George! Those eye turrets are fantastic! The SRS map does make you wonder if there are two forms of the species with different habitat preferences.
ReplyDeleteI had a Platybunus triangularis in the garden the other day, which is the very early maturing species.
I'm pretty sure I had M. diadema at Parc Slip this week - I was actually going to post a picture on here for someone to id for me. Seeing George's photo it looks like that's the one. I'll post it in a bit for confirmation.
ReplyDeleteI used to think of Megabunus as uncommon and in rocky places - I was first shown it in NE Carms by Ian Morgan. I now see it widely in Carms, though seldom remember to record it, and it's pretty frequent on the shaded wall of our rural cottage.
ReplyDeleteAs for SE England, I saw at least one Megabunus on a tree trunk in woodland on a chalk down above Chichester last month whilst looking for epiphytes (Ulota coarctata, George).