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Look out for Spiders

by John White

Autumn is the best time to have a close look at spiders for this is when they are most abundant and active. Some of the dew covered webs you will see will be orb webs made by the garden spider. They are spun at dawn or dusk depending on the species of the spinner. Other webs are in the form of hammocks often with a mass of vertical threads above or blow. Insects passing by collide with the vertical threads and tumble into the hammock. Though wet or frosted webs look very beautiful, they are ruined as traps because their efficiency depends on their being invisible to flying insects.

It is first of all a matter of luck that the spider places its web in the right place. If a bird or large mammal goes through the web, its a disaster. Since the spider has to use its body's resources to manufacture the silk, a lost or damaged web is a double catastrophe. The spider can't catch its prey yet it has to use its food reserves to make a new web.

However at this time of the year the spiders are coming to the end of their short lives. The silvery sheets of gossamer we see on the lawns in the morning are made by countless minute spiders. These ground dwellers, sometimes called money spiders, are tiny creatures, 2mm (1/16th inch) long. Each makes a web that may be no bigger than a postage stamp but can be so numerous that they completely cover the ground.

As well as sheet gossamer, you also have thread gossamer which is used for transporting spiders over great distances. The young money spider climbs to the top of grasses and plays out long strings of silk that are caught by the wind and lift the spiders into the air. They can be carried thousands of metres into the air to be snapped up by birds.

As children we believed these money spiders would brings us riches but we grew up to suspect it would be a rather long wait before that came true.

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