northeast-flora-and-fauna

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 , ...

This is probably an Orchard Orbweaver in my picture. Based on the pictures in my spider field guide, I thought it looked more like a Basilica Orbweaver , but based on iNaturalist feedback and some online pictures I'm now pretty confident this is the Orchard Orbweaver. I have to admit that spider identification isn't easy for me: Many spiders are small , making it difficult to see details even with my camera's magnification. My Six-spotted Fishing Spider and Yellow Garden Spiders are reasonably good size, but they're the exceptions. My field guide generally documents their sizes in millimeters, and you'd probably be surprised how many spiders we have that are under a centimeter in size. I can attach an extra magnification lens to my camera, though getting the camera to focus is harder. It needs to be manually focused, and if I sway slightly closer or further from the spider I can lose that focus. (I have better success if I'm able to lean or brace myself again...

Here is, I believe, a pair of Basilica Orbweaver spiders. (At least one arthropod professional endorsed this identification, so that's what I'm going with.) These spiders start life (spiderlings) building fairly conventional orb webs that we usually associate with spiders, but as they mature they begin building webs that are more complicated and somewhat domed, thus giving them the basilica part of their common name. Both males and females build these webs, frequently near one another. Like with many spiders, the females are larger, though at best they're only going to be about a centimeter in size. (I suspect that if spiders were a little bigger, I'd have more pictures for you, and I'd be better at identifying them.) They typically take down their webs at night and mostly rebuild them fresh the next day, but this species is also known to protect their egg sacs by wrapping the old web around them. I'm not certain that that's an egg sac in the picture; usual...