Dark lady

Another crazily busy day saw me having to scoot into the garden to do my invert hunt in what turned out to be the worst light of the afternoon. But flat light can work for you, of course, and I think the sombre tones here enhance rather than detract from the rather saturnine beauty of this female Xylota segnis. That's my claim, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Today's second image carries a trigger warning: arachnophobes beware. For anyone who isn't girly about spiders though, I think it's quite interesting in that it shows a biter bit: the prey is Empis livida, a dagger fly which sweetens its diet with nectar, but mainly uses that piercing proboscis to feed on other insects. The spider is some kind of Xysticus, I believe, but as with many arachnid genera, these are difficult to identify to species level from photographs.

R: C1, D15.