Arachnid Excitement on the Quiet Side

 

Asticou Azalea Garden

26 September 2021

Picking up where I left off yesterday, here are some more pictures of the morning fog on Frenchman Bay:

The tide was high.

We drove to Northeast Harbor, on the "Quiet Side" of Mount Desert Island. The Asticou Azalea Garden seemed a good place to spend a little time while the fog moved off. The azaleas aren't in bloom now, of course, but the garden is still pretty.

I had both cameras with me, hoping to find a few spiders. Jack pointed out some dewy sheet webs:

I found a couple of grass spiders hiding in their webs. Only one photo is worth posting:

I found one tetragnathid:

And a dragonfly (I assume), which I somehow captured with my macro lens from a distance:

There's a Japanese sand garden in the middle of the park. The sand is raked to look like ripples on water, which isn't apparent here:

The sand ripples blur tree shadows:

Jack, who was battling post-Covid fatigue, said the walk here hit the spot.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spider dart onto her orb web. By the time I got my camera out, she'd gone back to her hidey-hole in the bark of a tree. This was the same place I found a spider, a humpback orb weaver, last time. How likely is it that this would be the same one? Not likely. I tried to get a decent shot, but she was tucked in behind a mess of silk.

As I was fussing with my camera, a weensy little jumping spider, fuzzy and gray-brown, leaped onto the screen. I let it crawl onto my hand (they're friendly that way) and then let it drop from a silk line onto my jeans.

From there, I took dozens of pictures. This little critter was not camera shy.

I lifted it up and put it on a bush in front of me, where it pootled around for a few minutes.

All of this made me very happy. Jack could not have cared less.

So I took a picture of a flower.

At the edge of the garden there was more raked sand, this time on the foot path.

It was getting late for lunch. By the time we arrived in Southwest Harbor, it was getting on towards 3:00. We chose the Upper Deck because it had outdoor seating. Only when we got there did I remember that this was the restaurant that overlooked the marina, a working harbor, where the Margaret Todd spends her winters.

We were just about to the entrance when I saw the spider hanging on her orb web by a window. I scurried back to the car to get my good camera.

She was feasting on her lunch, and there was no way I could get a shot of her from the back.

When we went inside, though, I saw that nobody was seated by the window, so I got some photos through the glass.

I zoomed in on the camera's display. Arabesque orb weaver? No, not that. The cross pattern. Cross orb weaver? Jack negotiated an outdoor table while I Googled "cross orb weaver." Bingo! Araneus diadematus! A new one for me!

Jack could not have cared less.

As we ate, the afternoon fog crept in.

The fog was coming in back in Bar Harbor, too. I can never get enough photos of the Porcupines covered in fog.

After sunset, I went back to the empty orb web I'd seen in the hotel's flower bed in the morning. Sure enough, there was a big spider in there.

I took photos from the underside first, because that's the side that was facing the sidewalk. From that, I could rule out Neoscona. I've stared at enough Neoscona bellies to know what they look like.

Getting a photo from the other side meant putting one foot into the plantings. I was glad that it was dark and that nobody was around. I leaned in.

Another Araneus diadematus!

I would be remiss if I didn't give a shout-out to the pair of Zygiella x-notata living on the hotel balcony. The common name for these is the "silver-sided missing-sector orb weaver," which is a mouthful, so I simply call them all Ziggy. The "missing sector" refers to their orb webs, which they weave with a section missing, like a pie with one slice gone. Sometimes they fill the gaps in, but I know what they look like without their webs. The Ziggys on the balcony were all grown up from the babies I'd seen in the spring, so they were much easier to photograph this time. I also had the right camera.

Ziggy North:

These spiders tend to wait in a retreat away from their webs. Ziggy North's retreat was under the railing, behind a wad of silk and a glass support. 

Ziggy South's retreat, in the corner at the balcony's edge, was more accessible:

She stayed out on her web long enough for me to get her good side.

The second time I saw Ziggy South out on her web, I leaned over the balcony to take a picture. Her reflection in the glass support ended up being more in focus than she was.

The Ziggys and the hotel's A diadematus hid during the day. Several times I was on the balcony at sunset. As if on cue, both of them jumped onto their webs minutes after the sun went down, made some repairs, and ducked away under the balcony again. As for the A diadematus, I always made a detour to her flower bed whenever we passed by after dark. I saw her out there the next night, but we were on our way to a dinner reservation. Never take a spider for granted; when we returned, she'd already packed it in for the night.

I did find her again the next morning, briefly. She was at the edge of her web, looking busy, and making for her retreat in a flower.

I didn't see her again after that.

About half a mile away, on the southern edge of town, we had dinner reservations on our last night. We sat outside, on a deck of a repurposed house, facing the street. As we were finishing up, I noticed the little spider hanging from the railing next to Jack's right shoulder. I didn't have my good camera with me, and the best I could get was lousy, even after making some exposure and color corrections. But it was enough for me to guess that she was another Araneus diadematus. Next trip, I'm bringing the good camera with me everywhere.