My obsession with spiders continues - and there are plenty of them around the house right now. They are still the same species I describe in "Spiders: learning to love them" - the house spiders, wolf spiders, daddy long-legs, trapdoors and those incredible garden orb weavers - but I constantly get to see new behaviour within metres of where I sit to write this. I become inordinately fond of each one of them.
28 grey house spiders (Badumna longinqua) made their webs on the glass pane doors this year. I have only got two left. One moulted today. Of the other 26, one died when moulting - always a risky business. One went to a white-tailed spider, which, despite a widely believed myth to the contrary, are harmless to us. But they feed on the house spiders. And the other 24 went to the birds. The superb blue wrens and the white-browed scrub wrens sit on the veranda rail and survey the smorgasbord. As each spider grows to the size of a decent meal, a bird attacks - with deadly accuracy - taking my wiggling friends mid-flight back to their nests. I even watched a white-throated tree-creeper climb the brickwork around the door feeding on my spiders. The birds bred well this year. But my two survivors stay hidden behind thick silk mesh, so I have high hopes they will make it to breeding.
There is one of the bigger black house spiders (Badumna insignis) who has made a web against the window in the kitchen - inside. I am much more used to them outside, but she is out on her web a lot of the time in the heat - she built her retreat against the metal window frame! I called her Fenestra (strangling the French for window). She's had male company in the web for a fortnight now.
And I haven't even started on the daddy long-legs with their egg sacs held in their jaws above my head, or the wolf spiders in their burrows just outside the back door. And to think - I used to be an arachnophobe. Never again!
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We have a little bird-dropping spider in the garden this year, different to the ones I've seen before. Instead of round, brown egg-cases with lovely black squiggles, these are smaller with little spikes on them. Like tiny liquid amber seed pods. Do you know what they are??
Hi Froggy,
I don't recognise your description of the egg sacs, but I'd love to know more and see a photograph. The Museum of Victoria will almost certainly help if you send them an image. The bird dropping spider is a stunner, isn't it!
But it may be that no-one can identify your egg sacs. The truth is that the behaviour of most of our native spiders is a blank page - the arachnologists are still really busy trying to classify them - a task they estimate may be only 20% complete. So it is possible you are observing something which is not yet documented!
I have started a project through my website (www.lynnekelly.com.au/spiderbloggers) to try and get amateur naturalists to record such observations so we can compare notes. There is a rich tradition of amateur observations in natural history serving a much wider audience.
Thanks for your comment!
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