Favoritos de lavabite

Espécie endêmica da região e relativamente frequente na vegetação ciliar de riachos encachoeirados nas encostas íngremes da Serra do Mar, sendo mais raramente encontrado em vegetação herbácea em áreas de brejos e alagados.
Indivíduo macho mostrando o significado do epíteto da espécie "amplicoxae", que significa "coxa larga"

Snapping Turtle came out of the water onto the small island in the center of the pond, took a Canada Goose egg, and then went back in the water. The whole thing was over and done with in about two minutes. The Geese were not too happy.

A scrappy expanse of silky refuges and capture webs littered with body parts of previous victims. When preferred prey is entangled, the female spiders emerge from their 'nests' and overpower it by grabbing its extremities. In this case, a wasp https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319446.
Presumably they inject venom because after a minute or so the prey stops struggling. Then they snip it out of the web and carry it into one of several 'nests' or refuges.
Unwanted prey, often beetles (see https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319435 ) are also killed but sometimes left in the web, uneaten. Ants, in this case, Maranoplus ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/9319390 )scavenge around the periphery of the webs, feasting on unwanted beetles or other left-overs.

You know you’ve found a large moth when…

1. After a 40 year career as a wildlife biologist, you can’t believe what you’re seeing is real.
2. Your ruler isn’t long enough to get a good measurement (2nd image), so you go back to get a longer ruler (3rd image) and that isn’t long enough, so you scramble around to find a carpenter’s measuring tape to fully span the wings (4th image).
3. Your astonishment is like the joy of a child on Christmas morning; you start laughing and giggling uncontrollably.
4. The largest moth on your sheet has a wingspan 40X the size of the smallest one.
5. You stay up until 3:30 a.m. journaling about one moth.
6. You start taking selfies...with a moth (last image).

To the best of my ability to measure this critter, the wingspan (with a bit of the tip of the right FW missing) is about 27.8 cm, so it would probably be about 28.5 cm (11.2 in) if it were intact. The species is said to have the largest wingspan of any Lepidopteran in the world.

The moth was initially discovered on the sheet by Mary Kay Sexton. I had overlooked it.

To read more of the story, see:
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/gcwarbler/13211-mothing-in-panama

[See also: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/218581553]

This observation is for the spider. The crab is logged in a separate observation. A crab was observed in the spider's web, still alive. Evidently it must have fallen into the web from a tree trunk above. It was unable to free itself and at first the spider kept its distance. Within a couple of hours, The crab was no longer moving, suggesting that the spider had successfully administered a venomous bite. The crab was subsequently trussed up in silk and carried higher up in the web by the spider.