A Nigma

I know that for some of you two spiders in four days would amount to two too many spiders ever, but I’d like to point out that however big he looks on your screen, in the flesh he’s only about 3mm long. In fact if I hadn’t spotted his mesh web spanning an elder leaf, and taken a closer look, I doubt I’d have noticed him at all.

Nigma walckenaeri was first recorded in Surrey in the 1890s, but for many decades it was confined to the Home Counties, and regarded as rare. Then it began to spread northwards and westwards, and in 1993 it turned up in the Severn Valley. Over the past thirty years it has colonised most of Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, and during the last ten years it’s moved into Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire as well.

N. walckenaeri creates its distinctive webs (which are used as both a prey trap and a retreat) on leaves with curved surfaces, using a range of trees and shrubs in both domestic and wild settings. I often find it on ivy. Only males have this striking colour contrast between the cephalothorax and the abdomen: females are entirely green and white, and though they’re slightly bigger than the males, this makes them even harder to spot.