MY FAVORITE SPIDERS

     My favorite spiders are black and yellow garden spiders, wolf spiders and six-spotted fishing spiders.  And like all spider species, they have eight legs, are arachnids, related to scorpions and horseshoe crabs, and suck bodily fluids from a variety of invertebrates.  

     My favorites are large, attractive, and common species across much of the United States, including in southeastern Pennsylvania where I live.  I 've seen all these harmless, fascinating spiders, close to home, several times in my lifetime.  And I enjoyed every one of them.    

     The beautiful female garden spiders have one inch long bodies, six eyes, short, silver hair on their thoraxes and black and yellow patterns on their abdomens.  Each one daily creates a new orb web of silk that is about two feet, or more, across and hangs vertically between tall vegetation, and in fences, in farmland.  A thick, white, zig-zag band of webbing stretches vertically in the middle of each web.  

     Each dignified female hangs up-side-down in the middle of her web, which I've noticed several times, and waits for invertebrates to get caught in it.  When she feels a critter struggling in her web, she rushes to it, paralyzes it with a sting and wraps it in silk for a future meal.    

     Garden spiders' large webs are most lovely at sunrise after a night of rain or dew.  Droplets on the web sparkle like diamonds in the low-slanting sunlight.  Those silken webs are profoundly rich in beauty. 

     Male garden spiders are half the size of their mates.  They are thin, mostly brown and create a small web on the edge of a female's big, orbed web. 

     Each fertilized female garden spider lays several eggs in up to four rough, light-brown, papery sacs, each of which is about an inch across.  She attaches each sac to the center of her webbing.  She dies in the first heavy frost of autumn.    

     However, the young spiders hatch in fall and overwinter in their nursery sacs.  Those many spiderlings emerge in the warmth of the next spring and grow to maturity by late summer. 

     There are several kinds of wolf spiders in the United States, and Carolina wolf spiders, which I see in my home area, are the biggest ones.  This type of wolf spider has a body a little over one inch long, and is mostly dark brown, which camouflages them on the ground where they live.  

     All wolf spiders are hairy and nocturnal, have eight eyes on their heads, live in burrows in the ground, but don't spin webs to snare invertebrates.  Each individual, solitarily, hunts down and attacks invertebrate prey on the ground.  Wolf spiders may look scary to some people, but they don't bother us.   

     Each female wolf spider lays several eggs into a white sac that she conspicuously drags along with her in her hunting forays.  When the spiderlings hatch, they clamber onto their mother's abdomen for safety.  I have seen a few female wolf spiders with young on their abdomens, one crossing a country road.  I hurried that female on her way across.

     Six-spotted fishing spiders are quite handsome and unique with green-brown, three-quarter-inch bodies, with a silver stripe the length of each side of the upper abdomen.  And they have twelve white dots on their upper abdomens and six dark spots under their abdomen, which gives them their name.  These wolf spider relatives have hairy bodies and eight eyes, but don't spin webs.

     Fishing spiders stand, camouflaged, on aquatic vegetation on the edges of ponds and slow parts of streams, with two or three legs in the water to feel vibrations caused by small creatures in the water.  These spiders catch and ingest invertebrates, tadpoles and tiny fish they snare in the water's surfaces.  

     Female fishing spiders spawn into an egg sac they guard while hunting for prey in the water.  They guard eggs and small young until those progeny disperse.  

     My favorite spiders are intriguing to know and lovely to see.  They are harmless to us and inhabit  unique niches.  And, even if the reader never sees one of them, it is nice to know they live among us and consume lots of pesky insects.    

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