Updates and Introductions

So, how is everyone in the spider realm? Just fine, thanks!

Mostly, anyway. Someone vacuumed Legs up a few days ago, and she hasn't reappeared. Dead or moved to a less hazardous corner? I don't know, but I suspect the former. I have been looking for her. Milady also seems to have disappeared, but not to worry. There are plenty of widows in the garden!

Speckles stills spins her web, and Peekaboo and her kind are busy all over the yard. I'm getting quite fond of the Funnel Spiders, actually. They're so blessedly easy to spot, and they build such impressive webs.

Now, on to the cast:

 

On first spotting the messy web, we thought there might be another widow lurking between the lime tree and the wall. They (widows) do like the rims of pots. Turns out, though, that this is an entirely different lady. Like Legs, Penelope is a Cellar Spider, aka a Daddy Long Legs Spider, aka a Pholcidae. They eat widows. Go Penelope!

I love the little pattern there on her back, such a delicate little etching.

 

Ozymandias here is one of the Funnel Web Spiders aka a Grass Spider (who doesn't live in grass), from the Family Agelenidae, Genus Agelenopsis (thanks, bugguide!). She's got a massive web. It covers the space between several of the leaves and is far, far larger than you'd think a lady her size could manage.

 

I'm working on learning to spot spiders resting during the day. I'm not terribly good at it yet, but it's fun to try. Here's Speckles, resting in her homemade hammock at the edge of her web.

I think I mentioned we have no shortage of Black Widows? Here's Francoise, settled in comfortably on the statue of Saint Francis in our yard.

Objectively considered, she's beautiful.

I'm not sure I'm objective.

Speckles

Last night around 8, Speckles wasn't much interested in web weaving. Instead, she was staying to the side, working on a little, lined pocket to hide in.

There are several spiders of her kind weaving in the Bird of Paradise.  Between these, the funnel web spiders, the unidentified black spiders, the transients, and the others I know I'm not seeing yet, I could probably spend the next several years studying the one plant and not make my way through all the spiders and their habits.

Yesterday Evening: Big Spider Gone?

Last night wasn't a big spider-hunting night for me. I checked for Stretch but couldn't find him; judging by the zigzags on the 23rd, he may have wandered out of the yard all together in search of a mate. Big Sal, also, was absent. Given her reappearance last time, though, I'm not ready to write her off as gone just yet. Maybe she was simply full after her morning bee and decided not to build another web that day (Do spiders do that? I don't know).

I spotted Speckles, or at least one of her sisters, and admired a tiny little spider spinning in the bottom of one rosebush. I'm not going to try for an ID on him because I couldn't get a good look at her back or abdomen.

Big Spider may be gone. When I came home, she'd spun two of her anchor lines, but that's as far as the web ever got. I saw her out on it around midnight, but haven't spotted her since. She really wasn't in the mood to pose, either.

Has she gone wherever spiders go when the fall is over? (Dead?). Why are there more spiders in the fall than any other time? Or, at least, why are they so much more in evidence? Why haven't I ever asked that before?

Also Starring: Speckles

Speckles spins her web out front in the big bird of paradise out front. I've only seen her a couple of times so far, once in the center of her web here, and once curled up at the corner looking like a bit of debris with legs.

She's tentatively identified as "having a Zygiella/Parazygiella look" by some of the folk on bugguide who made me smile by describing her as "this beauty" (The actual post is here at the moment, but may not remain for long; they do pretty regular cleanup there, removing old requests for identification and either archiving photos with the proper ID or removing them to make room).

She is lovely, isn't she? The little sketchy design on her back is very chic.

Like Big Spider, she's an orb weaver, but I'm not sure how long it takes her to spin her web. Maybe one of these days I'll catch her starting.