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There are so many spiders in our house & garden we considered renaming it "spider cottage" for a while! I'm going to stick some of the weird and wonderful ones I've seen on this page for posterity.
Woodlouse Spider (found 06/01/10):
I found a cool-looking spider on the floor of our kitchen today. It had a brick-red thorax and legs and a yellow abdomen and I'd never seen one like it before so I duly went on the web to find out if it was indigenous to Ireland - seemed unlikely with the crazy colours - but it turns out it is! Its a woodlouse spider and feeds exclusively on Woodlice which is why it has such huge jaws. According to wikipedia and The BBC the jaws are big enough to bite humans but there's no venom. Seemingly they sleep by day and hunt by night under rotting logs and suchlike so humans rarely see them, so I'm pretty chuffed to have had the privilege. Below is a photo Aine took of him in a box on our kitchen counter: 
Its hard to see the detail of the spider in that photo (Aine was lamenting not having a macro lens for the camera) so here's one I found on the web of a Woodlouse Spider eating a Pill Woodlouse: 
And here's a photo I nicked from the BBC website that shows the crazy colours a little better:
They also have good shots on wildaboutbritain.co.uk, wildaboutbritain.co.uk again, and bugsandweeds.co.uk
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