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 , ...

Here is, I believe, a Marbled Orbweaver . If this is true, this is presumably a male since the females have a very round abdomen. Though you'd probably consider this to be a small spider, there are quite a few smaller spiders kicking around. (I suspect that when arthropods get much smaller than this, they mostly go under our radar. But that doesn't mean they're not kicking around out there.) The large round female abdomen is no doubt important in their ability to lay "several hundred" spider eggs. In the fall a female will create an egg sac with these eggs, and in the following spring pitter-patter X 4 of little spiderling feet will be heard (if you have extremely sensitive hearing) as they emerge. September 8, 2020 at Fairview Farm Photo 94667782, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)