Spider Traps Made Of Corrugated Plastic Perform Poorly In Wet Weather

Shortly after the New Year, I deployed another set of spider traps in the woods near my house in Seattle, Washington (USA). I had a number of questions I hoped these traps would answer about the introduced crab spider Ozyptila praticola (Thomisidae), including:

• Will O. praticola use traps made from corrugated plastic?
• Will O. praticola use traps made of rolled-up single-sided cardboard (the easiest trap to make)?
• Does the orientation (vertical, horizontal) of the corrugated channels make a difference?

Corrugated cardboard and plastic
"stack" traps

Corrugated cardboard "roll" traps

I had recently found that small stacks of flute B cardboard placed in the crotches of shrubs work very well as O. praticola traps. Therefore, I made another set of these "stack" traps as a control. Next, I made a plastic version of the control traps, using corrugated plastic instead of cardboard. And finally, I rolled strips of single-face flute A cardboard into cylinders to make "roll" traps. This is the same material that I used previously for tree trunk bands. On 4-Jan I set out five cardboard stack traps, five plastic stack traps, and ten roll traps, each in the crotch of a different shrub. On 15-Jan, I checked the traps for spiders. 

Films of water formed inside the
channels of the plastic traps

Much to my surprise, the plastic stack traps were almost entirely devoid of spiders. The reason, it seemed, was that a film of water was blocking the bottom end of many of the corrugated channels. This was true even though no rain had fallen in over two days. Water droplets also adhered to the inner walls of many channels. I had considered the propensity of cardboard to absorb water to be a potential problem here in rainy Seattle, but it appears to actually be a positive attribute of the material in so far as it prevents water droplets and films from forming. I will re-test the corrugated plastic traps again this summer, during the dry season. However, they are clearly unsuitable for use during wet weather.

The cardboard stacks again performed well; each contained at least one O. praticola. In contrast, only six of the ten cardboard rolls contained any O. praticola. There was no correlation between the orientation of the corrugated channels and the presence of O. praticola within.

Even though the roll traps didn't perform as well as the stacks, they may be the best trap to use in summer because they will be much easier to extract spiders from. The layers of the single-face cardboard I use to make roll traps are easily separated regardless of whether they are wet or dry. But the layers of the double-face cardboard used to make stack traps only separate cleanly when the cardboard is damp. Summers in western Washington are dry, not damp.

Snails like my traps, too.

Although the traps had only been in the field for 11 days, gastropods had started to seriously degrade the outermost layer of some of the roll traps. The problem wasn't as serious with the stack traps because they were made with thicker face paper. In future, I'll put a band of box tape around the entire circumference of each roll trap to help protect it from grazing slugs and snails.