Rosie
They're not bugs. They're not even insects. They're arachnids. They're spiders. And if you take the time to watch them, they're fascinating.
Spider identification is difficult at best. With the help of the internet and a few friends who know what they're doing, I figured out a good many of what I'd been snapping pictures of. That having been said, I could be very wrong about some of these critters. We'll go with educated guesses for now. I've linked to Wikipedia pages for each species for background information on size and lifestyle; however, the photos there don't do the variation in pigments justice. If you really want to see the range of possibilities, plug the name into Google Images, iNaturalist, or BugGuide.
After photographing the same ones over and over again, I got to know their habits, and gave them names. Some of them might have gotten used to me and the incessant camera flash, or at least learned that I wasn't a threat. Others never stopped being skittish, and I had to sneak up on them. I'm bad at nighttime macro photography. It took dozens of attempts to get one good shot.
As tiny as they are, spiders aren't as stupid as one would think. They have a working memory that allows them to find their webs and remember where their prey is. They can distinguish between web vibrations to figure out if they should pounce or hide. They eat insects, but they also eat each other. They're not the least bit interested in eating you. They're complicated creatures, and they're everywhere.
The First One
I wasn't looking for spiders in particular when, wandering through my back yard on a mid-June morning, I saw an orchard orb weaver and got a picture of it with my cell phone. Its web was strung between Hosta leaves.
I never saw this spider again.
The Dogwood and the Mailbox
The night of July 30 was when my spider-spying got real. It started when a large orb weaver, a Neoscona crucifera, chose to build a web between branches of the dogwood tree near my front door. With its back towards me, I was able to mess around with my point-and-shoot Canon PowerShot and tripod until I figured out that my 2007 Nikon D40 with its manual macro lens was the right camera for the job. While lacking in modern amounts of megapixels, the optics are far better. I ditched the tripod. I never got fancy with bracketing exposures or any of that sort of thing. All I did to help with the lighting was carry a LED lantern in my left hand, looping the handles around a few fingers while I adjusted the focus. Sometimes it worked; most of the time it didn't.
If a spider is being cooperative, one can distinguish between male and female by the palps, which are feelers near the spider's mouth. A male carries sperm in sacs on his palps, and it's, well, obvious. This particular spider wasn't fond of me getting too close, so I never did figure out its preferred pronoun.
I never did find its daytime hideout. I did name it Dagwood because it lived in the dogwood.
We keep our front porch light on until we go to bed. In the summer, the front door is teeming with insects. The occasional moth gets inside, providing temporary entertainment and a snack for the cats. One night, a moth found itself ensnared in Dagwood's web. By the time I found it, the moth was entombed in silk.
Nom nom nom.
Dagwood sometimes faced the door. Some zooming in after the fact suggests that Dagwood was female.
That was August 8. For five days there was no Neoscona by our front doorstep. Then, on August 13, there was again. Dagwood? Or did we have a new neighbor, Blondie?
I never found out, because Blondie was a one-night stand.
The grass spider living on the mailbox lid was much more charismatic, and also skittish.
While Dagwood was sucking on her moth, the mailbox spider had himself a tasty green thing.
Definitely a male. Dig the palps.
Like Dagwood and Blondie, Mailbox Spider moved on.
Meanwhile, Upstairs
One of our bedroom windows faces south. It's the only side of the house that gets any direct sunlight. The day after Dagwood appeared, I noticed a web on the bedroom window. I used the Canon this time to zoom in on what appeared to be a spider among some cluttered debris.
It was so small that I needed to zoom in and mess with the saturation to figure out what I was looking at.
Was this a young Neoscona domiciliorum? The daytime retreat of debris certainly fit the description.
I kept an eye on the little spider for the week or so that it stayed in the window. We had a heat wave. Rather than bake, the spider left.
Out Back is Where It's At
If a spider-watcher wants to be lazy, she needs only to step out of the back door onto the screened porch. There are always spiders clinging to the walls. Ubiquitous, small, and drab from a distance, close up, house spiders, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, are pretty.
As with many spider species, the females are bigger than the males.
On the southeast side of the porch, by the door, there were three females. One took the south wall.
One took the corner. She was the largest of the three, and hung, motionless and graceful at once. I named her Big Mama.
The third called the door hinge her home. I named her Dooris.
There were a few on the western side of the porch, by the other door, but they weren't as easy to get pictures of. The light was worse on that side.
When they finish with their prey, these house spiders excise it from their cobweb, littering the floor below. Such was the case on the porch; I was impressed by the size of what these little spiders had been eating.
As the summer wore on, I kept watch on the house spiders. But the real action was on the other side of the back of the house, off the deck, in the corner, where the rose bush grows.
Rosie
It was early morning, on an August weekday. I had taken some compost or recycling or something outside. I was on my way back to the porch door when, out of the corner of my eye, off the side of the deck, I saw a ring of spots.
Oh, hello! The orb web was a couple feet across. In the middle hung a reddish-bluish-grayish Neoscona crucifera. All I had was my cell phone. I had to get close.
She saw my shadow and scooted to a branch on the rose bush, bunching herself up to look like a leaf or a dead insect or something, anything but a big, juicy spider.
I ran inside and upstairs to get my good camera. By the time I got back, the girl had called it a night and was taking down her web. She moved so quickly that the best I could get was a couple of blurs.
That evening, I was back to watch her build her web.
And so it began. If spiders can have OCD, Rosie had it in spades. Just after sunset, timed so that I could just barely see her without a flashlight, she would come out from under the deck and start her web. First it was the spokes, always passing through the middle to deposit a wad of silk for stability. Then she'd proceed, always clockwise with her back to the yard, from the outside in, bouncing along.
If Jack and I were making dinner around sunset, I'd step out of the kitchen onto the deck to watch her. Jack would call me back in. After dinner, I'd grab the Nikon and the lantern, and take pictures of Rosie.
Sometimes I was lucky enough to have the camera out while she was building her web. Getting pictures wasn't easy; I needed a flash, and she moved in and out of focus so quickly.
As long as I didn't get too close or vibrate her web, she put up with me learning how to use my camera. She was a good model. She had charisma. She was fuzzy, and she seemed to change color, depending on the light.
One evening I caught her emerging from under the deck.
One of her permanent web lines was there.
She disappeared in mid August. I figured she must have laid eggs and died, or perhaps moved on. I thought I saw a maple seed hanging from the underside of the deck, and on the seed appeared to be a few bumps. Eggs, maybe? Hers?
But then, two days later, there she was, hanging from the underside of the deck in the early evening. A moth flew into her and she barely budged. Was she dying?
No, she was not. She was waiting for darkness to fall so she could build her web.
As the summer draws to a close, Neoscona crucifera females will conserve energy for egg-laying by leaving their webs up during the day. They'll also start staying out later into the morning.
I saw her out there once, but I cast a shadow, and she did her I'm-just-a-leaf thing.
On a day where she'd already gone inside, I misted her web.
When Rosie builds her web, Rosie dances.
Some nights she used her web over again.
When the old one got too tattered, she'd build a new one.
Now it was September. I wondered how much longer Rosie would be around. This species only lives for a year, and, clearly, Rosie was no baby.
As the days got shorter and colder, Rosie's web-building became more erratic. It no longer faced the same direction every night. I was able to approach from angles I couldn't before.
Had she lost a leg? One of her front ones?
Her sunset web-building routine shifted, too. I found her weaving at 10:00 p.m. several times.
Nine hours later she was out in the early morning, feasting on a big breakfast.
Then it was back to late-night weaving.
Now she had company. Off her web, but near it, was another spider, a fraction of Rosie's size, with a shimmery bronze abdomen and black legs.
When she went under the deck, the dewdrop spider moved in on her prey. Rosie had a housekeeper who hung around for a few days.
That was the last time I saw Rosie alive. The next day, September 10, I found her carcass on her web.
What happened? Did the dewdrop spider kill her? Did she have an infection from her missing leg? Or was she just old?
Two days later her carcass fell to the ground and I left for a week in Maine. It took nearly a month for her web to fully disintegrate.
In early October I peered under the deck to find an array of lines from the side to the floor above. Suspended from one of them was a maple seed with what might have been egg sacs. Were they Rosie's?
The Babies
I'd taken to wandering through the back yard, lantern in hand, looking for other spiders. On the day that Rosie died, between the rose bush and the redbud next to it, I found a little Neoscona crucifera. From where I stood, I couldn't determine if it was a juvenile or if it was a mature male.
There were baby spiders everywhere. The trick to finding them was to look for pale specks between leaves. The trick to getting anything close to a photo of these animals was patience and a full battery.
Unlike Rosie, the babies were rarely in the same place two days in a row. That made trying to photograph them all the more important, and impossible.
There were babies on the rose bush.
There was one living on the deck's wind chimes.
The late afternoon sun would sometimes catch a web on the deck. I'd go out with my camera to find out who lived there. I found this one's web off the part of the rose bush that had grown onto the deck. I scared the critter, who tried to hide on the leaf. That made for a better background. I guessed it might be a juvenile Larinioides cornutus, a furrow orb weaver.
At night I found another baby clinging to the underside of the plant hanger on the deck.
There were two spiders on the hanger the next night.
This blurry baby was on the deck section of the rose bush.
Early one Friday evening, the sun caught an orb web between the legs of the chair on the deck.
Swaying in the breeze was (another? the same?) Larinioides cornutus.
I found a little something over on the other side of the yard, between branches of the blue spruce. The best I could get was an impossible blur.
The smaller they were, the more infuriating it was, and the harder I tried before giving up.
Back to the rose bush.
Dangling between leaves of one of the many Rose of Sharon shrubs in the yard was a minuscule dot of a spider.
Aside from the cooperative Larinioides, I didn't try to figure out what any of the others were. My camera wasn't good enough.
The Lemon Drops
Not everyone was so small. Smaller than Rosie, but large enough to get pictures of with much less frustration, were little yellow spiders with red legs, Aranaus marmoreus, marbled Araneus thaddeus, lattice orb weavers.
I saw the one burrowed in the Hosta next to the Rose of Sharon first.
There was another one, smaller, living in the Fucshia off the deck's plant hanger.
Now you can see how much pigmentation varies from one animal to the next in the same species.
The one on the Hosta disappeared at the same time that I found another on the Rose of Sharon next to it. Was this the same one in new digs? She was now hanging six feet off the ground. I named her Jefferson because she had moved on up.
Meanwhile, in the Screened Porch
No evening was complete without a cruise through the screened porch. A broad-faced sac spider, Trachelas tranquillus, guarded the door and was not the least bit perturbed by my flash. This spider demonstrates how to wear various shades of purple.
The house spider on the south wall laid an egg sac. I'd be leaving for a week in Maine soon; I might miss the hatching.
In all this time, I hadn't yet looked up at the ceiling. When I did, I grabbed a chair and stood on it for a closer look. Parasteatoda tepidariorum hatchlings!
A cornucopia of hatchlings! A spidery chia pet!
Over several days, the babies dispersed.
Mom had disappeared for a couple of days, but she came back. I caught her sucking on a gnat (or maybe one of her babies) while her youngsters wandered off.
The Ziggies
I didn't bring the Nikon with me to Mount Desert Island. I ought to have, because on our Bar Harbor hotel balcony, suspended between the vertical slats of glass, were four orb webs with pale, grayish-beige, nocturnal, skittish denizens.
With my Canon PowerShot, I had to get close to get any picture at all, and that meant I'd scare the poor critters before I could get them in focus.
I learned more about their patterns by uploading the photos and zooming in. There was a hint of red. If one of these could just put its back to me I could get a better look.
The screen on my PowerShot can tilt up, which came in handy when I decided to lean over the balcony and get the camera as close to the spider as I could. The other advantage was that the spider couldn't see me from there, and I didn't cast a shadow.
Again, I didn't see the details until I uploaded the picture.
Wow! This is one pretty creature!
I searched online for "red and yellow spider." Nothing matched.
There were two other regulars on the balcony. This one hung out near the railing.
And this one was on the ceiling. I didn't even try to identify these two. I'd given up.
Months later, a friend-of-a-friend, a naturalist who I friended on Facebook, figured it out. The clan that was keeping us company on the Bar Harbor balcony was Zygiella x-notata, the "missing sector orb weaver." The red ones were juveniles, the silver-backed brown ones adults.
I hadn't paid much attention to their webs. Having seen so many in tatters, I only realized later, after a friend of the naturalist asked me to check the webs, that, indeed, one sector was missing from each of them.
I named them all Ziggy.
Back Home With the Regulars
We got home long after dark, and there was a lot to unpack, put in the washing machine, and put away. Still, before bed, I went out to check on the spiders.
The not-Rosie Neoscona crucifera was still between the rose bush and the redbud.
The next night it was gone.
The yard belonged to the marbled lattice orb weavers now. Jefferson proved herself as reliable as Rosie. Every night she was in the same spot on the Rose of Sharon. Above her web, tucked under a leaf, she had built her nest. I found it because I inadvertently shook some branches when I tried to get in close. Sensing danger, she retreated, and I followed her with the camera.
OMG she is so cute in there. (Jefferson says, "Piss off!")
I let her be and wandered over to the rose bush again, moving the lantern around, hoping to catch the glint of a web or a juvenile.
Instead, the light landed on another marbled lattice orb weaver. This one's abdomen was reddish.
I wasn't sure at first what she was, but the rest of her matched the other lemon drops. I named her Captain Red-Butt.
I went back over to Jefferson. She'd come out of hiding.
Behind me, in the back of the yard, hanging from a Hosta, was another marbled lattice orb weaver.
This one wasn't around long enough to get a name.
I went out the next morning to see if I could find Jefferson in her nest.
It looks as if her abdomen were laced up. I know it's three months late, but let's call her Lacey.
Did Jefferson catch a bee?
After perusing the back yard, I'd go up onto the deck to look for babies in the rose bush or the hanging fuchsia. One night I found another marbled lattice orb weaver. It was busy eating.
I got better at not disturbing Jefferson.
The marbled lattice orb weaver on the deck was around for several nights. I was able to get surprisingly close, considering she was looking straight at me.
When she turned, I zoomed in on her abdomen.
OK, now I see the marbling latticing (is that a word?). All it took was an upload and some digital zooming-in.
The next night, Jefferson was hanging low enough that, when I waded hip-deep into the Hostas to approach her web from the other side, I was able to hone in on her abdominal pattern too.
An overexposed spider and her barely-visible web:
I stalked Jefferson during the day sometimes too.
I don't know what was different about the light the night I took this picture. She looked like a shiny, glass bead.
Captain Red-Butt's marbling was weird pattern was on-spec for a lattice orb weaver.
She looked as if she were wearing a fuzzy pink hat over her abdomen.
I was scanning an overgrown herb bush one night, and was about to give up, when, out of the corner of my eye, down by my shins, I saw a little, yellow dot.
The dot slowly climbed up the center of the bush. I followed with my camera.
It took her 14 minutes to reach her web. Never mind what she was doing on the ground; she was able to find her web and her nest from down there.
Her web and nest were at eye-level.
Finding it again the next morning was easy, especially because we were well into autumn now and the shrub was losing leaves.
Semolina Pilchard was there the next night
and the day after that.
And night and day and night until she wasn't.
The Captain was difficult to see in her nest during the day.
But I always found her at night.
As the nights became cooler, the spiders were moving more slowly, which made it easier to follow Captain Red-Butt as she built her web.
Sometimes I'd inadvertently nudge a branch with my arm, and she'd retreat.
I'd come back the following night.
She started leaving her web up during the day.
On rainy nights, she usually stayed in.
Captain Red-Butt was the winner of Last Spider Hanging, Outdoor Division. The last night I saw her was November 9.
On November 10, her nest was empty.
I checked back for a few more nights. She never returned.
I did see a juvenile grass spider ballooning down from above on December 10. It was the second one of the autumn that I'd seen floating past the kitchen window. I had my cell phone with me and caught a blurry picture as it landed and scuttled under the deck. This late entrant into the contest was disqualified. Hiding isn't hanging.
Carnage
Towards the end of September, I noticed a tiny web on the east side of the yard. The vertical silk line above and below the center had me hopeful that I'd found a juvenile Argiope, an oversized orb weaver a friend of mine had seen down in rural southern Pennsylvania.
I had a tough time getting a good picture of the spider because I was shooting into the sun. The words "trashline orbweaver" kept bounding about in my mind.
I went out again the next morning and got confused. Were there two spiders on the web? Were they mating, or was one eating the other? I couldn't tell what was going on, even when I enlarged the photo on the camera's screen.
I took a bunch of pictures and uploaded them.
After a little research, I figured out that the trashline orb weaver had been attacked by a pirate spider of unknown genus. The invader plucks at the web to vibrate it the way a trapped insect would. When the victim steps over to investigate, the pirate spider attacks. Some pirate spiders take over the web. The one didn't. After a few days, the web fell apart.
Webs Everywhere
We had a few misty mornings in September and October. When I went outside to photograph the webs I knew about, I found myself surrounded by webs I didn't know about.
Jefferson's web:
An unidentified web in an azalea:
A web in the rose bush:
A sheet web on the deck stairs:
Semolina Pilchard's web:
A sheet web on the ground:
The workings of at least one spider, maybe Semolina, on the herb bush:
Captain Red-Butt's web:
Evidence of wandering spiders on the top of the rose bush:
Filmy webs on the Rose of Sharon:
A web on an azalea:
A tiny orb web, a few inches off the ground, strung between Hosta leaves:
Another little web hidden in the Hostas:
When I went out at night, I looked where I'd seen the webs during the day. I didn't find anyone new.
Juveniles Everywhere
Through September, and on any warm night after that, I could be sure to come upon a juvenile spider or three. They'd be the size of the head of a pin if I was lucky. Focusing on anything smaller was too much to ask of my meager equipment.
I found an interesting little one on the rose bush, perhaps a Larinioides cornutus.
Most of these little dots were transient. One, however, I could be sure to find on the same herb bush that Semolina Pilchard had climbed. This one was probably another Larinioides cornutus. I named it Speck, and, for a while, Speck was neck-and-neck (or, more correctly, cephalothorax-and-cephalothorax) with Captain Red-Butt for Last Spider Hanging.
There were other orb weavers.
And there were some whose webs I couldn't see.
Speck, though, always hung in the same spot, facing the same way, and never moved when I got close.
Some juveniles are translucent.
Some have a red spot on their abdomens.
Some are still Speck.
This one was extra-snazzy: both translucent and spotted.
I don't know why I bothered with this one:
"Look, Ma! I'm John Travolta!"
Don't worry, little guy. You'll get the hang of web-building someday. (10 November 2021: it's a baby orchard orb weaver!)
For scale, the leaf in this photo is the tip of a fern frond.
On the left is the tip of a dead rose flower.
I got a closeup of one of the red-bellies (a baby orchard orb weaver) on the redbud tree.
Thanksgiving Day was unseasonably warm (or would have been, fifty years ago). I could hear my neighbors bending pandemic precautions as they gathered outside. What brought me out was the sun shining on a piece of web. I had to investigate.
The babies were out.
As the sun went down, a red-belly caught a gnat five times its size.
The days and nights got cold again. I stopped looking around the yard and turned my focus to the screened porch.
Alice
When entering the porch from either inside the house or from the yard, I learned to close the doors gently, because any vibration would send the skittish, dark-brown spider in the upper west corner darting into her hole between the screen and the wall.
I had to sneak up on this Steatoda borealis.
On any given night, I usually had about three chances to snap pictures before she'd scoot off into her corner.
Once I caught her on the ceiling. Only once. Every other time, she was in her web.
Sometimes I'd catch her with her bottom hanging out.
If I hadn't just come from taking pictures of Captain Red-Butt on the other side of the yard, I'd have been worried that Alice had captured one of my favorite subjects. I got up on the chair for a closer look.
I don't know what this is that she was eating.
The last time I saw Alice was November 10, as she hid in her hole.
Last Spider Hanging, Screened Porch Division
Dooris had laid two eggs sacs. One hatched on September 19.
The spider on the southern wall had laid three; one hatched on September 23.
Big Mama, however, was blissfully egg-free.
A male came by to mind the southern spider's babies. And maybe eat them.
On the night of September 28, I found Big Mama industriously building an egg sac. Over the course of several hours, she laid on a thick coating of silk.
She stayed by it through October.
Dooris got herself a snack.
Big Mama stretched her legs.
And on October 16 she made another egg sac.
A male hung out above Big Mama for a few days, then disappeared.
The house spider on the southern wall had crawled up into a corner, away from her eggs.
On the opposite wall, there'd been what appeared to be a juvenile male grass spider.
On the night of November 8, he'd made it over to the southern side. I saw him near the eggs, and watched as he made his way up to the corner where the house spider was hiding. He paused a few inches away. The next day, both he and the house spider were gone.
Big Mama remained.
The male hung out for a while.
I wondered how long Big Mama would survive. It was getting cold at night, sometimes near freezing. I doubted her eggs would ever hatch this late in the season.
I didn't check on her every day, but each time I did, she'd changed position.
Dooris had curled up under the hinge and stayed there, motionless.
On December 4, I peered into the corner. After three months, Big Mama's babies had hatched.
On December 16 we had another deep freeze and a snowstorm. This, I figured, was it for Big Mama and her brood.
Until blowing snow covered her web, I'd had no idea how extensive it was.
The snow continued overnight. Big Mama's web was decorated for Christmas.
She was still there, behind it.
And she survived. Several times over the next few days, she changed position.
On Christmas Day, Big Mama moved away from her hatchlings. I watched her climb up the wall.
She settled into the corner.
Today is December 30. Big Mama has been changing position almost every day. I don't know how long she'll do this, but for now I'll keep checking in on her. She is the Last Spider Hanging.
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