Steatoda grossa, a second record for Essex
Peter Harvey 32 Lodge Lane, Grays, Essex RM 16 2YP
On 16"' April 2002 Iris Cotgrove found an adult male Steatoda grossa (see plate 3) in her
house at Leigh-on-Sea , only the second record for Essex. The only other record for the
Watsonian recording county of Essex is of females in a damp cellar in Manor Park in 1983,
at the author's old home in east London. The spider is found most often in and around
buildings, but has also been taken in sheltered locations outdoors in cracks in walls and on
undercliffs, and in a sewer system in Leicester (Lee in Harvey et al, 2002). S. grossa has
always been a southern species, and is particularly widespread in south-western England.
Westmorland has been its furthest north occurrence, but remarkably the spider has recently
turned up in numbers in a conservatory in a house in Orkney! The owners had previously
lived in Plymouth (where the spider is apparently very common, virtually replacing S.
bipunctata), and it seems that it must have been imported with their crates of furniture,
which were stored in the conservatory before being unloaded (Andrew, 2002).
Iris has given me the following details about her Essex discovery. As she went to bed on
16lh April, she switched on the wall light over the bed and saw a spider with red legs and
a red thorax running over the wall beside the lamp. Iris realised she had never seen one
like that before, and managed to capture it with a plastic tumbler and card, then transferring
it to a glass jar. The next day she took the spider to Roger Payne who had also had never
seen one like it before! Roger subsequently identified the spider as Steatoda grossa, and
sent it to me for confirmation. After photographing the spider, it was eventually preserved
on 21s' May (adult males do not live long anyway) and is now retained in the author's
collection.
Iris had been on holiday in Cornwall in September 2001, and there is just the possibility
that she might have brought the spider back to Leigh in some way. A phone call to the
hotel found it under new ownership, but the owner has apparently promised to investigate
the resident spider populations! However S. grossa may in fact occur undetected but
more widely in Essex. Its relative frequency in the damper climate of the south-west, its
occurrence in a damp cellar in Manor park and in a sewer system in Leicester all suggest
the possibility that the spider prefers higher humidity - investigation of cellars, tunnels,
culverts and underneath drainage inspection covers in our 'dry' county could well be
profitable - even if not for S. grossa, then for the cave spiders Meta menardi and M.
bourneti. Over to you!
References
Andrew, R.H. 2002. Steatoda grossa (CL, Koch, 1838) (Theridiidae) in the Orkney
Islands. Spider Recording Scheme Newsletter 43: 2.
Harvey, PR., Nellist, D.R. & Telfer, M.G. (eds) 2002. Provisional atlas of British spiders
(Arachnida, Araneae), Volumes 1 &2. Huntingdon: Biological Records Centre.
Essex Field Club Newsletter No. 39, September 2002 11