I have what my husband thinks is an irrational fear of spiders. I know all about how beneficial they are blah, blah, blah. They still creep the heck out of me. However, I am also fascinated by them - outside of course.
This web kept returning but I never saw the spider. The web itself isn't huge but its anchors are. They span across three huge hydrangea bushes which, coincidentally, fill our backyard.
Today, Jeff saw some type of trigger web or something and said the spider was probably hiding under a leaf. Sure enough it was. You have to bend down to look under the leaf. After Jeff did, I looked and promptly bolted right into him trying to escape the grasps of the harmless spider.
So, to feed into my fear (I do this with horror movies, too), I visited several times today to see what was going on. I think it is a garden spider though the colors aren't as brilliant as I've seen. Surely it is an orb weaver (I already know too much). One visit, I was gratified with the spider bolting out to the middle of the web, quickly doing some spider thing and bolting back. The whole experience took .25 seconds.
Did you know that garden spiders eat their webs at night and make new ones in the morning? I find it all fascinating though it does give me the heebs. Click on the photo to make it bigger and you can see spider food in the web, too.
More pictures here and:
Eeek! I am okay with the teensy household spiders (don't love 'em, but I can live with 'em), but the other week I found a HUGE, scary looking spider in my garden. I'm telling you it gave me nightmares! I should have taken a photo of it and put it up on the internet to see if someone could tell me what type it was--I am just assuming it was a man-eater! Could have been innocent though. It didn't look like yours, although yours is impressive!
Posted by: Sharon Sarmiento | September 26, 2007 at 03:19 PM
oh boy, you would not like it at our house. We have wolf spiders living in our house. We leave them be so they can eat the other insects LOL! I'm not a huge fan of creepy crawlies, but these guys always run when they see us, so I'm happy to let them be, and hope they do make an impact on the other buglife. There are a lot of bugs in FL.
Posted by: nyjlm | September 24, 2007 at 10:59 AM