Out of curiosity and because I do this regularly, I’ve spent the last four days wandering our gardens. Mind you, I don’t have a green thumb and almost any volunteer is welcome to flower, especially if they’re attracting pollinators.
iWhat I discovered is that in the sunshine and rain of honeybees and gnats, the place is alive. . .
to paper wasps,
and even several Great Black Wasps, their smoky black wings glistening with blue iridescence as they frantically forage for food and defend territory (including letting that person know that they are not welcome at the party by aggressively flying towards them).
Bumblebees were also full of buzzing and rumbling, and it was they that reminded me of an important fact.
The color of the storage baskets on the hind legs depends on the color of the pollen grains of the plants visited.
There were millions of other insects, well, maybe not millions, but at least hundreds that flew and sipped and buzzed and hovered and crawled and even cuddled, the latter being mostly ambush bugs with the darker and smaller male resting on top of the female.
And then, while searching, I discovered an insect that was being packed for a meal to be eaten later. I have long been fascinated by Ambush Bugs and Assasin Bugs and this one, the black and yellow garden spider, Argiope aurantia. What is not to love? She is an orb weaver, which means that she spins a complex circular web, in this case between tall plants, with spokes that aren’t sticky to walk on and round wheels that are sticky to catch prey . The network is the size of a plate. A great record. And . . . She consumes the whole thing every night and builds up a new one for the next day. While it is consuming the threads it can take advantage of small insects like mosquitos that get caught in the stickiness, but it is the larger insects that it prefers to eat.
Do you see the rather noticeable zigzag line in the middle of the web? This is known as a stabilimentum and can have several purposes: to provide stability; Attracting insects with the many threads like an ultraviolet runway like the colored lines and dots on plants; or maybe announce to the birds that they shouldn’t fly through the internet. Whatever the reason, the spider hangs in the middle of the stabiliment and waits for the dinner bell to ring.
Although she has eight eyes, her eyesight is poor. But . . . Her hairy legs can also help detect that a meal has arrived, perhaps signaling sounds and smells, and she can feel the vibrations.
Once trapped, she injects a poison (which is harmless to us bipeds) to immobilize her object and then begins to roll a sack around it.
Remember, I’ve watched her for four days while she plays the waiting game upside down, showing her egg-shaped belly with its asymmetrical yellow markings on the shell (similar to a turtle shell) to her silver-haired head.
Some days it felt like she was just Charlotte writing a message that only Wilbur could interpret.
And one day she surprised me by turning to the right. I was then offered to take a closer look at the small bumps on her head that act as eyes. And the pedipalps, those two little hairy appendages that protrude from her head and function like sensory organs.
About an hour after I found her upright, when I checked again, I thought she was gone. Instead, I discovered that she had climbed one of the plants on which she had spun her web.
Perhaps she surveyed the area as she waved her forelegs and looked around her realm.
A day later, a new net and another meal packed, and slowly my buzzers were used up. But she also likes locusts and crickets and the garden is full of them.
And then dawn this morning, with TS Henri approaching and a few raindrops on a broken net that announced the planned arrival of the storm. Wait. The net – it had holes in it, but it wasn’t completely used up. That wasn’t all, yesterday’s meal wasn’t eaten either. And the spider was nowhere to be seen. I looked up and down and around and couldn’t find them. Had she planned to save the meal and wait for her poison to pre-digest it by liquefying the internal organs and flying in something larger than she was, and dinner went uneaten? Did our time together just end like that?
I didn’t want to let go of the problem and kept looking, guess who I found on a new web about three feet away?
Even more exciting was discovering that I can see her from the kitchen window AND the view is on her underside so I can actually see her brown spinnerets at the end of her abdomen and maybe I can watch her catch a meal.
Well, I thought, but two hours later, the next time I looked, I realized that I had missed the action and that she had already safely wrapped her newest victim – all that was left to see was a leg.
While the prey may be one, this is NOT just another insect in the middle of my search. It’s actually not an insect at all, because spiders are arachnids, with eight legs compared to the six legs of an insect. It may be scary large and carnivorous, but it is beneficial for the garden as it helps control insect populations, including some pests.
And how do I know that she is one of them? I haven’t met her male counterpart yet, but he’s much smaller and quite brown, in contrast to her beautiful coloration.
I am sure there is more to this story and I look forward to learning more about it as I try to interpret the messages it leaves. If you get the chance, go out and stalk your gardens and be amazed by what you find.
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