Yellow Garden Spider

For Throwback Thursday, this is one of our biggest and most prominent orbweaver spiders, a Yellow Garden Spider I met back in 2020 [1]. I actually wanted to link to a post of these large spiders when I was talking about the much smaller Bold Jumping Spider a couple days back, only to realize I hadn't posted about them here [2]! Doing a Throwback Thursday post was the quickest way to remedy this deficiency in the blog.

These are 1 of our biggest spiders and are also among our most prominent with their black-and-yellow coloring. While you can get eyestrain looking at a lot of our orbweavers (e.g. Basilica Orbweaver, Marbled Orbweaver, Orchard Orbweaver), the Yellow Garden Spider is comparably a cinch to spot and ID.

Although all spiders are somewhat venomous, the Yellow Garden Spider's venom isn't especially potent. It's generally considered about as bad and dangerous as a bee sting. It's been theorized their black-and-yellow color is an example of aposematism, where the coloring is meant to make it easy to spot them and avoid a (somewhat) dangerous creature (usually because it's venomous or poisonous). It's also possible this is a weak example of Mullerian mimicry, where the black-and-yellow reminds potential predators of black-and-yellow stinging insects like most yellowjackets and some bees. (I say this is a weak example just because the spider is structurally quite a bit different from yellowjackets and bees.)

They're also known for the zigzag that's part of their web. It's been suggested that it might function as a decoy for something that might want to prey on the spider, or it might confuse insects that might think it's not a web but a good place to land, or it might help birds to see the web and prevent them from blundering into a sticky mess [3]. This assortment of ideas suggests to me that we're just guessing as to its purpose.


September 4, 2020 at Duke Farms
Photo 94483767, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

[1] AKA Black and Yellow Garden Spider AKA Golden Garden Spider AKA Writing Spider AKA Zigzag Spider AKA Zipper Spider AKA Black and Yellow Argiope, corn spider AKA Steeler Spider AKA McKinley Spider; you can call these guys practically anything.

[2] Before Tumblr inexplicably nuked a blog I was using there. In response I left Tumblr, destroying the Tumblr counterpart to this blog. That Tumblr counterpart almost certainly had an old Yellow Garden Spider post.

[3] Just like you don't like walking through a spider web, birds probably don't appreciate flying through them.

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