A friend of our garden...we had a few of these gals spread out through the yard. They look more fierce than they are. Get to close to their web and they run and hide...unless you're a grasshopper, in which case they are rather fierce.
Mom's life cycle is complete. She relocated her web from our garden to our front door. We watched her catch lots of insects. Every night, she would eat the center of her web and then reconstruct it. On a windy day, a pine needle got stuck in the web. When the winds died down, we watched her carefully cut it out and rebuild her web.
Then along came a male that we missed. The male is half her size and a plain, skinny brown dude. We missed the drama because, in a spider's world, the female rules and gets all the attention. If the male approached too quickly, he's simply became another meal. He has to approach carefully by building a web next to hers, or even in hers, and carefully entice her by tugging on the web strands. If she likes what she sees, they have a sexy rendezvous, then she eats him. Either way, approaching fast or slow, he becomes a meal, but going slow means having a moment of fun for his one and only fling before becoming the main course at dinner.
She must've liked the male that approached her. She carefully hung her egg sac on the side of the house. It's hard to tell in the picture, but the egg sac is hanging and not touching the house. She knew what she was doing. By suspending the egg sac, it's a lot harder, even near impossible, for ants to find a tasty egg breakfast.
After laying her eggs and carefully hanging them, she dropped to the ground and died. If she did everything right, the eggs will remain in the sac throughout the winter, and next spring thousands of her children will emerge ready to begin the life cycle all over again. And if you think a web isn't all that strong, consider that egg sac will hang, suspended, all winter and through every winter storm and never fall to the ground. If it does fall to the ground, it'll become a tasty meal for ants or other insects or even marauding shrews or mice.
Mom
Next year's generation
© 2012
Mark Darien
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