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Now you see me, now you don’t.  Australia is well known for all creatures great, small, venomous, bitey, spiky, leapy and apparently hell-bent on ruining your day - there’s a list of them as long as your arm.  However,  the wraparound spider (Dolophones conifera) is not on that particular list.  Although it has given many the shock of their lives when it suddenly appears in front of them, this spider doesn’t want to hurt you. In fact, it has developed a cunning camouflage technique with the sole purpose of being left alone.  It’s waiting, resting up, patiently letting the daylight hours pass it by until night falls and its work may begin again. Image Credit

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In the meantime, it needs to be unseen, particularly from its main predator – birds.  So, over countless millennia it has evolved the ability to wrap its body around twigs of its forest home.  It can do this so effectively that when still it simply looks like a small nodule where new shoots, leaves, or flowers might emerge.  The underside of its bodies is concave, and this allows it to press itself so closely on and around a twig that nothing or no one can spot them unless they decide to move.

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This is not mimesis (think a stick insect mimicking a twig), but rather a form of camouflage called masquerade or crypsis.  What the wraparound does is similar to mimesis but not quite the same, since it's imitating background texture, not a specific object or another organism.

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This adaptation probably developed in its Western Australia home due to severe predation back in the distant past.  One spider mutated to allow itself to wraparound a twig and passed this on to its descendants.  This successful camouflage allowed these spiders to thrive and reproduce while the other spiders who could not wraparound decreased in numbers until they disappeared altogether.  Although this is  a simple way of describing what may have happened, it is the most likely.

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If this, in addition to the multitude of Australian species that seem to want to kill you, has put you off visiting the country, please take something else into account that I haven’t so far mentioned.  This spider is small.  It’s tiny.  It is sexually dimorphic, meaning that the male and female look different.  The female can read almost a centimeter in size and the males are even smaller, often being about 5mm.  Of course, like all spiders, they have venom, which they use to subdue its prey but it is not medically significant to humans.  Wraparound bites are incredibly rare (even though the 17 species are not uncommon by any means and are not considered endangered), so the chances of being bitten by one are insignificant.  So, don’t worry about being bitten by this little one!

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Yet, like any other spider, it does need to eat.  That is, perhaps, where you are in for a little surprise.  Dolphones is a genus of orb-weaving spider.  It doesn’t jump out on its prey from its hidden position on the twig. When the day is done and its safer from predators, the wraparound becomes active and starts to weave its web, usually about 40cm across. It is a web typical of orb-weaving spiders, wheel-shaped and suspended between branches or shrubs in order to catch flying insects like small flies or moths.  It begins by creating support lines to surrounding bushes to serve as an anchor.  Then the radial spokes are constructed one by one.  Its final flourish is a sticky spiral from the center outward.  It stays in the center, awaiting the vibrations that tell it that its next meal has been caught.

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Strangely, the wraparound often takes its web down before dawn rather than keep it up long-term.  This is another survival strategy.  In the daytime, the web might attract birds, thinking that the presence of a web indicates that a spider is somewhere around.  So, not only is the spider able to hide effectively by wrapping itself around twigs, it also tidies up after itself so there is no indication of its presence at all.  Crafty.

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Let’s hope that this fascinating spider continues to do what it does best - vanish in plain sight and keep us guessing where it went.