Living in a place similar to a nature preserve has us getting acquainted with the wildlife. Most recently, we've been watching dozens of gigantic spiders sitting in golden webs that started to show up about a month ago. It's a type of spider that can be found from the southeast US all the down to Argentina so it isn't rare, but I've never see anything like it. Enormous females with long striped legs sit patiently in middle of their golden webs. The ladies have bodies four to five times larger and100 times heavier than the skinny brown males who hang around in the webs up and away a little bit. These spiders live in colonies, sharing web infrastructure to form 3-dimensional nightmares up to six webs deep. We have a a few colonies nearby that we keep an eye on. Today, one of the bigger females seemed to be dead in her web with all eight legs hanging down like pale yellow roots. A male nervously moved around her body while a ghostly white spider, with an evil looking red spot, lurked above them. I went to find Carol to give her the news, trying to imagine what had happened. When we returned, the formerly-dead female was pale and moist but up and moving and the male spider was trying to get her in a family way. The ghostly white spider swung above them in the breeze, the way an exoskeleton does when it is left behind after molting.
No comments:
Post a Comment