Spider Costumes

One thing I'm learning: Spiders really know how to hide. Their costumes are much more subtle than the average Halloween attire.

These are the only spiders that regularly flaunt themselves in plain sight.  Most are a lot more subtle.

Take Dark Legs (a female zygiella x-notata). Can you see her up there? She has her legs resting on her "doorbell," a line of thread leading to the center of her web, but she herself gets to stay out of site.

How is that? Just a bunch of twigs, right? No spider at all.

That better? All that's really visible is the legs, just so long as you know where to look.

And here is Little Brown, an Araneus montereyensis, during the day, perched by the side of a twig, pretending to be a bit of bark or a drift of debris.

See? There she is!

Even larger spiders, like the Neoscona, can be hard to find. Just a lump in the brick:

Isn't it?

Funnel Web Spider in Flowers

I'm getting very fond of the funnel webs. They are easy to spot and quite willing to pose for photographs. Also, they have lovely stripes and beautiful gold and brown coloring.

The World of The Spider by Adrienne Mason

The World of the spider is a large book with plenty of space for photographs, and there are some lovely photographs, and Mason's text is brisk, informative, and to the point.

And... having said that, I'm stuck for anything else to say, even shortly after finishing it. It's a nice, informative book, but there's little to make it stand out one way or the other in a world full of nice, informative books.  It's got good photographs, but not the stunningly memorable ones found in, say, Nic Bishop's Spiders.  Flipping through it now, only Dwight Kuhn's picture of a jumping spider in mid-jump makes me pause for a second look.

So. there you have it: An unmemorable review of an unmemorable book. I'm not sorry I checked it out of the library, I'm also not sorry to return it.

Spider Byte

"Orb web spiders have special claws and non-stick feet so they can walk on their webs without getting stuck."
          from Spiders by Nic Bishop

Spider in Flower

I just liked the way this one turned out.

Who's Watching Whom?

I went to open the back gate, and look who was looking back out at me:

She's a bold little Agelenidae/Grass spider, too. So far, she's the only one I've had come out to see what I'm doing when I take pictures, and this in daylight.

Things I Thought I Knew But Didn't

 When I started this, there were some things I knew, or thought I knew, about spiders.

One of them was that spiders keep tidy webs, so if you brush away a messy, dusty web, you're not hurting anything.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Oh, the orb web spiders seem to fit this, more or less, but even they will cut corners. For the few days Belle was around, she tidied up her web every night and spun a new one, but Big Spider was not averse to re-using old anchor lines when she could, and once spun a shiny, new center while leaving the ragged outer edge untouched.

Other spiders are even less picky. The funnel web spiders have large, flat webs, perfect for catching the odd leaf or twig, and it doesn't seem to bother them in the least. Lady Lime has allowed a whole pile of debris to accumulate--just look at all those dead leaves!

Similarly, Legs, a cellar spider, was never troubled in the least by the odd bit of paper that got caught in her web, and her outdoor cousin Penelope, has allowed twigs, dog hair, and dried flowers to catch in her web without troubling overmuch about the housekeeping.

And as for the black widows! Milady's web was a shocking tangle of dog hair and debris, and it never did seem to occur to her that a little housekeeping might be in order.

It's not that they can't fix their webs. Treasure, a funnel web spider living below Lady Lime, recently had a huge rent in her web, probably caused when I was watering and shifting things around. She mended it quite tidily with some nice, new, smooth white silk. They just don't seem to care.

So much for my illusions or delusions.

Domestic Disputes: Update and Corrections for 'Knaves and Thieves'

Female zygiella x-notata aka Dark-legs

So, it seems I was somewhat mistaken about the Knaves and Thieves in the great fly theft incident. Thanks to bugguide, I have more of an update(1): This was more domestic dispute than daylight robbery.

They are a couple, probably zygiella x-notata, sharing a web.  Light-legs, the male, got there first, but Dark-legs, the female, wanted, and got, the fly. I have been poking around a bit, but I can't tell which of them likely built the web.

As far as I can tell, the couple got through yesterday's torrential downpour all right. At least, there are still spider legs visible behind the trellis near the edge of the web.


(1) Yes, I could have waited until after they'd replied to my ID requests, but I was too excited and interested.

The Spider by John Crompton, a book review

I almost didn't read The Spider. I'm in a hurry to learn as much as possible as fast as possible and The Spider, written in 1950, struck me as too dated. However, David Quammen had the wisdom to include some selections from the text in his introduction, and that lured me into starting. Crompton's opening paragraph hooked me, and I devoured the rest of the book. I'm glad I did. I would hate to have missed Crompton's prose and his easy, good-natured approach to spiders and people alike.

Actually, I suspect he rates the intelligence of spiders at a slightly higher level than that of most of his fellow humans, but he does so so charmingly that one can't hold it against him, and anyway, it is only the faintest of suspicions. On the whole, he seems to regard everyone, spiders and humans alike, as a group of charming, eccentric neighbors.

I read bits of the book out loud to whoever happened to be around at the time, and I look forward to reading more of Crompton's books and reading bits of them out loud as well.

I can't read out loud to you (probably to your relief), but I will close by giving the opening paragraph to the Preface, the one that hooked me:

Coming out of the theatre one may expect to hear some member of the audience remark to the other that the play, though very good, was quite impossible; that such things could never happen in real life. It always seems to me that the lives of certain insects are more like plays than reality. And very good plays a lot of them are, particularly those staged by the bees, ants, and wasps. But of all the plays now running, I am inclined to think that the one produced by spiders is the best. It has almost everything the modern audience wants; love interest, suspense, psychology, battle, murder, and sudden death. But here again one comes away with the impression that it is all very far-fetched; that such things could not possibly happen in real life.

And if you can resist that opening, the you are heard to please indeed!

Knaves and Thieves in the Spider Realm

I'm going to have to start carrying a camera with me all the time, not just most of the time if I want to catch dramas like this morning's great fly theft.

This morning, I went out to take out the trash and heard some buzzing. There was a fly caught in a web by the fence. A light-colored spider was trying, somewhat inefficiently to subdue it (At least, it was much slower than Cousin Sal's wrapping the bee had been). Over to the left, a smaller, much smaller spider, with similar markings was running up and down a thread, starting toward his/her bigger cousin and then aborting. The bigger spider was about 1/4 inch long, the smaller one the size of a pinhead.

That was interesting enough, but then a third spider appeared from the right. This one was the same size as the first spider but had darker legs. It came about halfway to the first, light-legged spider and plucked hard at the web. Light-spider kept on paying attention to the now-silent fly. Dark-legs plucked again. Light-legs ignored matters and kept on with the fly. Dark-legs ran all the way down to the spider, on the other side of the web and got kicked for his/her troubles, Light-legs still focused primarily on the fly, which she kept fussing with, though not wrapping.

She walked a little way away and dark legs dashed down and pulled at the web, hard. A tug-of-war ensued. Dark-legs won and began to carry the fly away.

I raced back for my camera and caught some of the rest.

Dark-legs took the fly to his right hand corner. Light-legs at first seemed resigned and began to wander around. Mending the web, perhaps? If so, I would have a better idea for certain whose the fly really was (after all, I had not seen the fly caught; perhaps Light-legs was the intruder).

But, no, after a bit of wandering, Light-legs oriented herself and marched up to the right-hand corner where Dark-legs had disappeared with the fly. There was a bit of kicking, and then all went still. I couldn't see behind the trellis, no matter how I tried, so I have no idea if one spider chased the other off, or killed the other, or if both settled down to share the fly, or if this was all a prelude to some domestic bliss, or what was going on.

The trellis remained stubbornly silent after this, and it started to rain, so I came in.

The pin-sized spider? He hung around on the left for a while and then gave up and tucked himself away behind the trellis on that side.

Light legs

Dark-legs takes the fly.

The fly vanishes.

Light-legs heads upward.

She is determined to get the fly back.

Some threshing legs stick out.

And all is silent.