Souvenir Remembered

 

Ziggy Ella Hitchhiker Souvenir

22 October 2026

This year's Smudge Award goes to Ziggy Ella Hitchhiker Souvenir, for being a spider known beyond the confines of iNaturalist.

Last month, I posted about a Zygiella atrica who hitched a ride from Bar Harbor to Central Jersey. This species doesn't live down here. At first, we'd assumed it was an immature male, which was fortunate, because he'd never find a mate in Mercer County. 

I named him Hitchhiker, but also Ziggy and Souvenir. 

I kept an eye on his palps. On a mature male, they look like maracas. Getting closeups wasn't easy. Hitchhiker's retreat was behind the passenger rearview mirror. The trick was to go out at night with my camera and not bang the car with my lantern.

If I'd been a proper, astute observer, I'd have suspected that the little black dot on Hitchhiker's underside wasn't pigment but the spider's lady parts, the epigyne. I figured things out later, when the palps didn't change, her front legs didn't lengthen, and I got another good look at her underside.

Hitchhiker kept to a schedule. By day, she rested at the edge of the mirror, one leg on the signal thread that connected her retreat to her web. At dusk, she'd pop down into the hub of her orb web.

When I first found her, in mid-September, her red sides were very red, and her yellows very yellow.

I figured out how to get her and her reflection mostly in focus. She liked to keep her back to the mirror.

Sometimes I could catch her web-building and get her from the back.

If I could sneak up on her during the day, I could photograph her poking out of her retreat.

Hitchhiker was predictable. I would say that she learned what it meant when I opened the driver's side door and started the engine, but the truth is that spiders live in a world of vibrations. Some mean food. Some mean get behind the mirror because we're about to go somewhere fast.

I noticed that when I parked the car in the driveway, she'd be back at her signal thread within minutes. 

Several times, I was away from home, waiting in the car for Jack at dusk. As soon as the sun went down, she popped into the center of her web. This amused me, because I knew she'd do it. I'd watched baby Zygiella on the railings of my balcony at the Bar Harbor Inn. I'd watched them zip back into their retreats at sunrise too.

Young Zygiella don't build their webs with the characteristic missing sector. Hitchhiker didn't either, for the first week on my car. Then she did. It was a milestone.

from "Spider Biology" by Rainer Foelix

(and, yes, I have this book)

I checked on her every day, taking pictures, because I had no idea how long she'd be around. I showed her to my biking buddies and my glassblowing buddies. 

"Is that spider still on your car?"

"Yep!"

It was now early October. My car needed washing. I couldn't. Not as long as Hitchhiker was living in the mirror.

It was mid-October when things began to change. Her reds dulled.

She got rounder, perhaps gravid, but unfertilized.

She would usually rebuild her web every few days. Now she got around to that later in the night than before. I would find her dangling, which finally gave me a chance to photograph her face.

Then she built a larger web than usual, with the missing sector at the bottom this time, the signal thread eminating straight back from the hub to the mirror. 

I didn't see her for a couple of days. I thought she might have died, but there she was at night again.

Then two more days passed. The web had deteriorated. Nights were getting colder, almost freezing. I figured she was dead.

Then, on October 18, after a bike ride where I deliberately left the car in a sunny spot, then drove home, there she was, out on what was left of her web, in the middle of the day.

I was happy to see her, of course, but I knew the end was near. First, she was out during the day; second, she hadn't fixed her web; and third, Zygiella don't overwinter.

She didn't come out that night, nor the next. On Monday afternoon, I was about to drive to East Falls to blow glass. I checked on her and saw a bit of her tucked into the mirror. I tried to get a picture with my phone, but it didn't work. At 7:30, as I dragged my tools back to the car, I spotted her and got a blurry photo.

I thought she might do her usual thing when I got home. I parked, took some of my stuff inside, then came back out. She wasn't at the mirror. I took the rest of my tools in and went out again later. Nothing.

Nothing Tuesday. Nothing Wednesday. Nothing this morning.

This afternoon I got the car washed.