We’ve had a rainy, buggy summer here in Upper Cryogenica, and I am greatly looking forward to the fall, which is my favorite season.
How buggy has it been up here, you ask? Buggy enough to support the breeding of this truly monstrous orb weaver, who is in residence next to the Castle’s main portcullis (behind the split to spare you arachnophobes):
For scale, the plank in the upper left corner of the photo is four inches wide. You can’t fully appreciate just how large this guy is until you see him close up. His body is the diameter of a grape. He looks big enough to snatch a hovering hummingbird out of the air.
I have a treaty with the resident arachnids. They eat bugs and I leave them alone. I only remove webs when they are in such close proximity to my regular living areas that I am in danger of walking through them. Otherwise I let the orb weavers do their thing, which is to eat all the annoying bugs that pester the shit out of me all summer. And come Halloween, all I need for house decoration is some artful colored backlighting.
I’m right in the middle of the Puget Sound basin and we are covered in spider webs right now. I only kill spiders inside the house so the back porch, eaves and overhangs are gaily festooned with webs. The spiders have been doing their jobs and I haven’t had a single mosquito bite this season. Yet.
By The Way, spiders spinning webs are female. Most of the males are nearly microscopic if I remember my 60 year old Hah Skrool biology correctly.
The males are usually smaller, but not by that much, though it does vary from species to species a bit. The ones taking over my garage are common house spiders, and the males are just a little over half the size of the females.
I used to have the same policy with spiders, but I’m starting to rethink it. They’ve pretty much taken over the garage, and I’m getting sick of walking into webs. If it weren’t for the lingering stink I’d have Raided them into nonexistance long ago. Need to find something less harmful to humans…
Geckos!
Awesome! Sometimes I like to think of late Summer here in Western Washington as “spider season”. The bugs come out in force and the spiders come out to eat them. I don’t know where they all go in the Autumn. Do spiders hibernate?