Wrap-Around (Dolophones conifer)

Physical description and identification

Almost everything about Dolophones conifer is built around one trick: pressing itself flat against wood. The abdomen is broad and squat, raised above into hard knobs and cones, and hollowed into a shallow dish underneath. When the spider settles on a twig the rim of that dish meets the wood all the way round, so there is no gap, no overhang and — the part that matters to a hunting bird — no shadow.

Adults

• Size: females reach about 9 mm (0.35 in) in body length; males are smaller at roughly 5–6 mm. Both are far smaller than photographs suggest, because close-up images flatten the sense of scale.
• Color: mottled grey, fawn and chocolate brown with paler flecks and darker blotches, matching weathered eucalypt bark. Individuals vary, and a spider is usually a good match for the particular branch it favours.
• Body shape: the upper abdomen is wider than long and carries paired tubercles — blunt raised humps — that catch light and shade the way rough bark does. Fine hairs fringe the outer edge and soften the boundary between spider and branch.
• Legs: short, thick and strongly banded. At rest they fold into shallow grooves along the sides of the body rather than sticking out, which removes the leg outline that gives most spiders away.
• Eyes: eight small eyes in two rows, typical of the family. Vision is poor and the spider depends on vibration in its web at night and on stillness by day.

Eggs

Egg sacs are wrapped in silk and fixed in a crevice or against bark near the female's territory rather than hung in the web, and they are as well hidden as the spider itself. Clutch counts for this species are not well documented; related araneids of similar size lay in the order of a hundred eggs per sac.

Spiderlings

There is no family life. The spiderlings cluster briefly near the sac after emerging, then disperse — many of them on silk threads carried by the wind. From the first moults they already have the flattened build, and juveniles can be found clamped to thin twigs that would not hide an adult. They reach maturity through the usual sequence of moults, with adults most often found in the Australian summer.

The web

The web is a full vertical orb, strung in the open air between shrubs or in the gap between branches, and it is a night-only structure. The spider leaves its twig at dusk, spins the orb, hangs at the hub while it is dark, and then eats the silk and returns to a day roost before first light. This build-and-remove cycle, shared with several other Australian orb weavers, is why people who find the spider by day almost never see a web near it. Our guide to spider webs covers how an orb is put together.

Where the wrap-around spider lives

Dolophones conifer is found only in Australia. Popular accounts often limit it to Western Australia, but that is too narrow: the species is recorded from the south-west as well as from South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, and it is likely under-recorded everywhere simply because it is so hard to see. Nothing in the genus occurs naturally outside Australia.

The habitat requirement is bark of the right texture. The spider lives in dry sclerophyll forest, open eucalypt woodland, coastal heath and mallee scrub, and it turns up readily in gardens, parks and bush blocks where native trees and shrubs have been kept. Within those places it chooses thin branches and twigs a few metres above the ground, usually on the shaded side, with enough open space alongside for a web to be slung at night.

Are wrap-around spiders venomous?

Yes, in the sense that applies to nearly every spider: the wrap-around spider has venom glands and uses venom to subdue the moths, flies and beetles it catches in its orb. That venom is of no medical importance to people or pets. No confirmed case of a medically significant bite from any member of the genus Dolophones has been recorded, and the species is not related to Australia's genuinely dangerous spiders — the funnel-webs and the redback.

Can wrap-around spiders bite?

A wrap-around spider can bite, but it is one of the least likely spiders in an Australian garden to do so. Its whole defence is stillness: threatened on its branch, it presses down harder rather than rearing up, and knocked loose it drops and runs. Its fangs are small and adapted to insect cuticle.

If a bite did occur, expect a sharp prick and perhaps an hour of local redness or itching. Wash the area with soap and water and apply a cold pack. There is no first-aid reason to restrict movement or apply a pressure bandage for this spider.

Ecological importance and behavior of the wrap-around spider

The wrap-around spider runs a strict daily schedule. It roosts camouflaged from dawn to dusk, builds its orb in the evening, hunts through the night and dismantles the web before morning. Recycling the silk recovers protein that would otherwise be lost, and taking the web down removes the single most conspicuous clue to where the spider is sitting.

Diet: night-flying insects — moths above all, plus flies, midges, small beetles, flying ants and lacewings. A spider of this size takes a meaningful number of insects over a season, and colonies in a garden quietly reduce the moth and midge load without any intervention.

Natural predators: birds are the main threat and the reason the camouflage exists; insectivorous species that pick over bark, such as treecreepers and thornbills, are exactly the predators a flattened outline defeats. Lizards, mantids and larger spiders take adults, spider-hunting wasps paralyse them to provision nests, and parasitoid wasps attack egg sacs. Ants scavenge sacs and dead spiders — they are predators and scavengers here, not competitors for a shared resource.

Camouflage as behavior, not just colour: the disguise only works because the spider chooses the right perch, orients itself along the branch and stays put for hours. That is a behavioural performance as much as an anatomical one, and it is why a spider prised off a twig looks so unconvincing in the open.

Relationship with humans: harmless and almost never noticed. Most records come from people photographing bark and realising afterwards that part of it has legs. It needs no control of any kind, and leaving mature native shrubs and rough-barked trees standing is all it asks.

Similar spiders and how to tell them apart

Quick facts

Did you know?

• The species was described in the late nineteenth century, and the genus name Dolophones comes from Greek roots meaning “to kill by cunning” — an unusually apt label for a spider whose whole strategy is deception.
• The concave underside is the real innovation. Flattened bark spiders exist in several families, but the hollowed belly that lets the body grip a curved twig without leaving an edge is what gives this group its name.
• Because the web goes up after dark and comes down before dawn, the spider is far more common than sightings suggest. Sweeping a torch across shrubs at night finds orbs where nothing was visible in daylight.
• Eating the old web is standard practice among orb weavers; the silk proteins are digested and reused, so a spider can rebuild night after night on very little extra food.
• The same flattening solution has evolved independently in African bark spiders and in unrelated bark-dwelling groups elsewhere, a textbook case of convergent evolution driven by hungry birds.

In summary, the wrap-around spider is a small, harmless Australian orb weaver whose reputation rests entirely on its vanishing act. Look along thin branches of rough-barked native trees for a knot that is slightly too symmetrical, and check for banded legs folded into the sides.