Meet this mini-monster at Deelfontein

He is mm long and his name is Cyrba Nigrimana or easier to remember black-hand orange jumping spider.
The Spider Club of Southern Africa is coming to Deelfontein on 13 February 2016. Come and join us for a spider walk in the veld in the morning and watch a presentation on South African spiders and their relatives after lunch. With something in the region of 2500 species of spiders in 72 families in South Africa we won’t find them all, but the Northern Free State grass veld is a very rich habitat and this is an excellent time of year for goggas of all kinds. Of course we might find other interesting creatures – red Romans, scorpions and harvestmen are all likely, not to mention mammals, birds and reptiles.
There will be a few books for sale and a chance to join The Spider Club. They will bring a microscope and other resources as well as spider-collecting equipment and show you how to use them. (You might of course already know!)
After the presentation, with your help, they will identify some of the spiders that were collected. Identifying invertebrates can be tricky and spider identification can be even more of a problem but let’s give it a try. We will also debunk some myths and give you the real facts on spiders and their relatives.
If you have pictures of spiders you would like to have identified or even live spiders themselves, bring them along.
Just for interest, the Spider Club of Southern Africa is over 40 years old. In 1975 when they began they had a total of 6 members, now they have several hundreds with literally thousands of friends on Facebook. In those days there were no books on South African spiders and other resources like The World Wide Web only got going in 1989!
We simply had to find out for ourselves, so we did. Now there are books, Wikipedia, Virtual Museums and all kinds of ways of finding out about almost anything but spiders and their relatives are still mysterious to many people.
So come along to Deelfontein and find out a bit more about these tiny predators that share our world.
Visit www.spiderclub.co.za