Hi, maybe this will help you: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25067838?uid=3737864&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102499085357

Or: http://www.european-arachnology.org/proceedings/17th/22Blandenier.pdf

Cheers, Nadine

Hi,

You can get very good sticky traps from the source below, whick work for a wide range of flying insects, and hopefully for your ballooning spiders.

http://www.csalomontraps.com/

Choose `Trap designs` on the left, then `sticky cloak trap` (PAL).

Kindest regards!

Jozsef

Hello - Interesting question! You're wise to think about trap placement and factors than may affect your measures of dispersal. One note of caution when interpreting results is that your traps reflect capture (and direction) only at the point of capture and may not necessarily reflect dispersal that is occurring (possibly in other directions) away from those traps. I know this sounds obvious, but I was surprised when sticky traps did not capture the ultimate direction of flight that occurred over the adult stage for some stoneflies I studied (I've attached a paper below).

Regarding traps, I "painted" Tanglefoot goo on screens and hung them at various heights. A citrus-based solvent, GooGone, was pretty useful for removing the insects from the traps, but it was still a nasty mess.

Good luck!

Kate

It was nice going through the answers and papers. Spiders have very interesting system of dispersal which is not fully understood yet. No distinct guilds can be constructed based on mode of dispersal. Therefore, designing a manipulative experiment is rather tricky. But the material received here will certainly help me in designing my project.

The traps described by Woolley et al. in JOA are actually climbing traps; they sample spiders that climb in order to balloon from the top of the vegetation. But, they also sample spiders that just happen to be climbing (possibly for other reasons). Also, they will not give you directional information. I have used them in wheat fields quite successfully, collected the spiders live and then tested them for 'tiptoe behavior' in an improvised wind tunnel to determine their tendency to disperse.

Yael

Thank you very much Dr. Lubin. I had not expected a veteran like you answering. I find myself surprised and lucky! Recently, I presented my proposal for approval and was suggested by all but one to leave alone assessing cyclic dispersal of spiders from sacred groves to agricultural fields and back. I had planned to use Hibbert and Buddle's enclosures to assess contribution of cursorial v/s aerial arrivals. And I wanted to use sticky traps in directional treatments to see if higher contribution came from sacred groves in the form of aerial dispersal.

I am at a loss to separate out confounding components like 'spiders dispersing' from 'spiders roaming' in enclosure set up. And after reading more, found that aerial dispersal is not restricted to short distances (on the contrary, might be restricted to long distances) over which I was trying to assess their movement.

Do ballooning spiders have control of any sort over their direction, altitude and landing point?