Stealthy Spiders

Even though spiders are far more abundant than meets the eye throughout summer, their presence becomes very conspicuous when the landscape of autumn mornings is sparkling with moisture. At this time, thousands of the dew-laced webs of some species decorate the plants in all directions.

An Englishman by the name of Bristowe estimated in 1938 that 2,265,000 spiders were present in a single acre in an undisturbed grassy area. That same person believed that the average number of spiders per acre in England and Wales was not less than – and probably more than – 50,000.

The Star-bellied Spider is an orb-weaver that lives in meadows of tall grasses.

Even though a field of crops is harvested and cleared at this time of year – followed by a new planting next spring – thousands of baby spiders can be “ballooned” to an area during the summer.

The extremely fine gossamer silk given off by each spiderling of the web weavers – as well as the non-web weavers – enables them to be swept up by the wind and carried long distances. I’ve heard this “safety line” is also referred to as a drag line.

When some baby spiders are being “parachuted” over the landscape like miniature aeronauts, others are traveling on foot. Wolf Spiders, for example, make no webs even though they look like some other web-spinning spiders.

However they do leave a drag line behind as they amble over the ground. Most people, while working in their flower beds or gardens, see them running on the ground. As children, we frequently saw them scurrying among the small rocks and stones along the beach where we spent countless hours during our summer vacations.

Wolf Spiders must run their prey down like a cat after a mouse. They are very keen-sighted and swift on foot compared to web-weaving spiders that are comparatively poor sighted and too slow to capture their victims any other way than by snaring them in their webs.

I fondly remember one large female Wolf Spider, her back covered with dozens of tiny baby spiders, which I photographed one summer. Occasionally one of her babies would venture a few inches away, then quickly scurry up one of her legs and rejoin the rest of the pack on her back.

She would gently brush those babies away that would crawl over any one of her eyes. Her eight eyes were arranged in three rows, the lower having four eyes. Two of the eyes were larger than the remaining six, and those are capable of reflecting artificial light at night. Two of the eight eyes were higher on her head and not easily visible.

The Wolf Spider is a loner, living and hunting in a solitary manner.

There are between 1,500 and 2,000 Wolf Spider species known to man and perhaps more than 100 species north of Mexico. Most hunt at night. Some dig burrows into the ground, while others make holes under rocks.

Many have no retreats at all. Because they are able to go underground, they make up a large portion of the total spider population in the Arctic and on high mountains.

It is said that a Wolf Spider may reach six or seven years of age. The large specimen I thoroughly admired and photographed, which was nearly three inches long, must have been at least a few years old.

Even quite recently and well into later October, I’ve been noticing several small jumping spiders on our garage door. As soon as I open the door they quickly fall to the ground and disappear in a flash beneath the metal molding at the bottom of the garage siding.

Jumping spiders, usually quite small and extremely fast moving, have relatively large eyes, especially the center one. According to the experts, they are among the best eyes of all invertebrates, those creatures lacking a backbone.

With the long-awaited Trick-or-Trick season, surely there are bound to occur some rather fascinating, albeit far-fetched concoctions devised for scaring passersby, or especially the little trick-or-treaters. Some feature enormous masses of gauzy spider web-like material draped over entire small trees or shrubs. Imagine how frightening an animated oversize spider crawling around on those gigantic webs might be!

I happen to shy away from those items or actions which unnecessarily continue to accentuate the bad, scary and undesirable aspects of spiders. These invaluable creatures, genuine partners in nature, continue to be despised and mistreated by the great majority of humans largely due to poor education and upbringing.

I can recall my dislike for spiders as a child but as usual have not the slightest remembrance of why or where that feeling began. Chances are pretty good that Little Miss Muffet may have been responsible. My attitude toward these stealthy creatures, known to terrorize so many humans, changed for the better when I began teaching. It soon became apparent that if I feared snakes, spiders and other “creepy-crawly” things so would most of my students. How could I expect them to develop tolerance, awareness and respect for all of nature without setting good examples for them?

It both amuses and bewilders me to see people, on the one hand, despise and want to kill every insect (invariably referred to as bugs) which they encounter, while on the other hand they go out of their way to also kill spiders which do the same! You would have great difficulty discovering better controllers of insect populations than spiders.

With such good and relatively inexpensive close-up lenses (macro) for nature photography, I become more fascinated by the year being able to get such intricate and enlarged pictures of spiders. Some of the more common spiders I’ve photographed and enjoyed at our place include the Long-jawed Orbweaver, Yellow Garden Argiope (ar-JY-o-pee), several different kinds of jumping spiders, Crab Spiders, and the ornate Star-bellied Spider.

It was the gentle and highly spider-tolerant Miss Emma Toft who came to mind as I read that outstanding children’s (and adults!) classic Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. In case you haven’t read it, please do. You’ll especially love this story if you grew up on a farm. Donald Culross Peattie, a famous naturalist and writer, said while observing an adult helping a child to watch a spider spinning a web: “If he (a child) learns admiration instead of disgust for the tiny spinner, he will have learned one of the greatest lessons in nature: That all life is sacred.”