Wild Spiders I Have Known

Today's blog title is taken from a book by Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known.  You can read it online here.  Being a famous Canadian and a founder of Boy Scouts, he was required reading for young Canadian boys. ET Seton has a very interesting life story and you can read about him on Wikipedia. 

The spider pictured on the left here is the Spined Micrathena.  Spiders are commonly classified for the webs they build and this one is what you call an "orb-weaver".  That's a very classical sort of spider web, a wheel shaped web with a spiral holding it together. 

Their web is the way the catch their meals.  Every evening, they eat whatever's in their web and the web itself and then they build a new one.  It's a good way to keep their webs clean.

The Spined Micrathena is very common in MD.  Early Saturday morning, at about 6 am, while MDW was sleeping, I set out on my mountain bike to ride a path nearby in search of a fabled shortcut to the Great Seneca bike path.  The path I chose was only about a mile but all the micrathena love this trail and had build many webs across it.  By the time I reached the end of the trail, I was covered in spiderwebs, especially my face and head. They don't bite and usually drop when their webs are broken but it's unnerving being covered by spiderwebs, especially with the spiders and the shell of their earlier meal still in them.  I think I'm ready for the Haunted Forest come Halloween.

I had high hopes for this shortcut.  It was along the path of some high voltage power lines and they had just mowed the field, making it fairly easy to ride through.  But, there were two stream crossings with steep banks I couldn't see when I first scouted this shortcut and that pretty much killed the idea.  While climbing up one of the sides of the stream, I came across an entirely different sort of web.

These sort of webs are made by grass spiders.  They are related to funnels spiders that build a web in the shape of a funnel and wait at the bottom to devour their prey.  Fortunately the MD species are pretty harmless, just like the micrathena.  We do have the brown recluse and black widows here but I rarely have encountered them.