Mary found this lovely lady hiding in the shrubbery — it’s the shamrock orbweaver, Araneus trifolium, and it was sheltered inside a folded leaf stitched together with silk.
In case you were wondering how big it is…
Thumbnail sized.
I was feeling a bit robust this morning, and managed to hobble all the way out to the backyard, where I could explore the fauna thriving there. Mary was hovering at my elbow to make sure I didn’t topple over, but I did OK — another week or two, and I might be going on real walks (as long as I don’t do anything stupid.) Things I saw that made me happy:
We spotted two monarch butterflies flitting over the garden. No photos, though, they didn’t land and pose for me.
The place is hopping with grasshoppers, which, while not normally associated with good gardens, is fine with me — the purpose of the garden is making spider food, not tomatoes. Mary may disagree with me.
Oh, and it was so bright. I’m not used to that anymore.
We also had lots of interesting pollinators, like this two-spotted longhorn bee.
Of course, the queen of the garden, the devourer of grasshoppers, the true monarch, was Argiope trifasciata.
It’s a fine crop, and congratulations to Mary on her superlative gardening skills. Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it to the front yard to see what wonders flourish there.
Finally, the black widow egg sacs have released their hordes!
Here’s a close-up of one of the spiderlings. Black widows start off with more spectacular patterns — as they mature, they’ll get red and yellow bands and racing stripes, before turning solid black with a blotch of red on the abdomen.
Pretty!
The peak season for Argiope is late summer, and I’ve been physically wrecked for all of August, so I’d resigned myself to not seeing any of these big beautiful spiders this year. Then Mary went out to the garden to pick tomatoes, and there, right there in my back yard, is Argiope aurantia nestled down in our rather weedy crop!
Strictly speaking, I haven’t actually seen one yet — Mary took an iPhone photo of one. It’s 5 or 6 meters from my back door, which is out of my current range, but I can aspire to hobble out there sometime in the next few days, I think. It gives me something to aim for, anyway.
I got to go outside! Actually, I had to go outside, since I have a ravenous population of spiders in my lab that must be fed, or there will be consequences. The one problem is that I’m still stuck in a wheelchair, which turned out to be almost no problem at all. The only steps I had to deal with were 3 short steps just outside my back door, and the rest of the way was all ramps, all the way to the science building elevator. Then, of course, I had my assistant Mary to push me there and back.
Actual photo of Mary helping me navigate the science building this morning.
The only real problem was that, as always it seems, we had another major thunderstorm roll through, with skies dark as night and thunder and lightning and a drenching rain. I think it’s fine that my return to the lab would be heralded with spooky nightmare weather.
Now the spiders are all snug in their webs, happily crunching through mealworms and flies, and all is right in the world.
And deciding to try starting at one end and eating the whole thing. This is the bold jumper, Phidippus audax, that I’m raising in the lab (I’ve got 6 different species of spider thriving there), and I gave her a large mealworm which did not intimidate her in the least — she’s bold, remember. This is a pattern with her. She starts eating a big mealworm, and gets full halfway through, and I’ll have to clean up half-eaten corpses in a couple of day.
(I know, not a great photo, but it was shot through some dirty plexiglas so that’s as clean as I could get it.)
Last year, I would go outside in the early morning, when the dew was on the grass, and see my yard dappled with grass spider webs. Dozens of them!
My yard was a village full of these little tent-like structures.They would appear in July through August, and I’d also see the grass spiders steadily taking over other micro-environments, creeping up the walls of my house and displacing the Parasteatoda who had been living there in early summer. I wasn’t thrilled about that — grass spiders were ubiquitous and so common that I would rather see more interesting spiders.
But this year…I went outside around 6:30am on a humid (but cool) summer day, and could see all the grass and clover dotted dew. What I didn’t see was grass spiders. Zero spiders. No webs. It’s August! This is prime spider population time, and my familiar little friends are gone. This is the first time in my 25 years here that they’ve been absent.
I missed an opportunity. If I’d been tracking these things all along, I’d have an easy metric to tally a sample of the spider numbers — if I’d counted last year, I’d guess the daily numbers in August would have been between 20 and 30 grass spider webs in my lawn, but I didn’t because I assumed they’d always be there. So I’ll have to start tracking now. The number is…ZERO.
On the bright side, the number can only go up from here. Or stay dead forever.
Maybe it’s just a weird seasonal fluctuation? Why would all the spiders disappear from a lawn with a diverse plant population, never in all these years years treated with pesticides of any kind? WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THIS PLANET?
The Steatoda borealis spiderlings have finally emerged from their egg sac! They are slow, plump, and numerous.
I spent a good chunk of the morning plucking them out one by one and putting them in separate vials. Tomorrow, once they’ve laid down some silk, they’ll get many fruit flies and will be able to make their first kill.
How nice. The mother of these spiderlings lies back and lets her babies eat her.
Not so nice: the spiderlings then gang up and cannibalize all the other adult spiders in the colony. Hooligans! These kids, always getting into trouble.
Which reminds me…I have to go into the lab this morning and sort out a couple of egg sacs I expect to see hatching out. The species I work with don’t practice matriphagy, but I do like to set up the young’uns with a lot of flies early on.
I hobbled into the lab this morning, anticipating a lot of spiderlings that would need to be sorted out. I’ve got several egg sacs dancing on the edge of maturity, and I’d noticed on Friday that one of the Steatoda borealis sacs was really close — maturing spiders were darkening and moving about just below the surface of the sac, so I expected to come in today and find an explosion of spiderlings scurrying about looking for something to kill.
I was disappointed. They haven’t quite emerged.
See the dark mottled blob on the top left? The dark things are spiderlings clinging together in a ball, with the bounds of the disintegrating sphere of the sac. The white things are the final molt, that leaves behind a crumpled bit of cuticle. But they aren’t out yet!
Also in view is a second egg sac which isn’t quite as far along. I can tell by the somewhat granular appearance of the contents that the embryos are developing just fine, maybe a week or two behind their older siblings.
Mom is also there, a bit out of focus. These spiders are very good mothers, hovering over the egg sac and fighting anything that comes along to disturb her babies. Also, they do the greatest kindest action — they do not eat their own children when they emerge, no matter how juicy and tasty they look. I expect there has to be a swarm either tomorrow or Tuesday.
Also I got a little treat: my tarantula, Blue, usually hunkers down in her hidey hole, but every once in a while she emerges to explore her big cage. Here she is, just before I rewarded her with a mealworm.
