Field Notes––

The Spiders

Are Coming

By Dottie Evans

The days are growing noticeably shorter and a few maple leaves have already begun turning red. It’s early September and the natural world is winding down.

There aren’t as many bird songs –– except for the blue jays who seem to enjoy calling out to each other in especially strident tones this time of year. Activity at the birdfeeder has waned. The cardinals are molting, so they mostly stay out of sight as if they knew there is no sadder sight than a temporarily bald-headed cardinal waiting for its new plumage to come in.

The swallows and the blackbirds are lining up on telephone wires, flocking to mass roosting places in preparation for migration.

While the birds are taking a breather or gathering before flying south, a new cast of characters is demanding attention. Stand outside on a late summer evening and listen to the deafening cacophony of crickets chirping, cicadas buzzing, katydids calling. What a racket! The insects are revving up for their last hurrah.

Their “songs,” which have nothing to do with voice boxes but are the rhythmic scrapings of wings or legs on carapaces or mouth parts, are a combined chant with an urgent message that goes something this. Must find a mate. Must find a mate. Here I am. Where are you? Only a few weeks left. Must lay eggs. Must launch next generation. Now or tomorrow. Before the frost or the spiders get us.

What about the spiders? They aren’t making any noise at all, but they are working just as hard to ensure survival of their kind by weaving webs and catching and eating as many of those insect choristers as possible. Spiders, too, must find mates, catch prey, and lay eggs before the first killing frost.

E.B. White, author of the 1952 children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, was a keen observer of spiders, especially the orb-weaving kind. His frequent encounters occurred while spending time in the barn cellar of his country home in North Brooklin, Maine, and his arachnid heroine, Charlotte A. (for the orb weaver family Araneidae) Cavatica, was able to save her dear friend, Wilbur the Pig, by weaving special words into her web.

There are 2,500 species of orb weavers alone. They are skilled engineers that construct silken wheels in one night with strands tough enough to ensnare prey much bigger than themselves. Bumblebees, flies, grasshoppers, even other spiders may fall victim to the sticky threads.

The strands are so strong and the web structure so ingenious that small fish jumping in streams have been caught in spider webs overhanging the water. E.B. White once freed a hummingbird caught in an orb spider’s web, and he wrote about holding the tiny bird in his hand as he brushed off the cobwebs before releasing it.

Who has not experienced the shock of walking face first into a spider web when exiting the garage or walking a familiar garden path. That web might not have been there the day before, but orb weavers work fast –– usually at night. They will create a new web or rebuild a damaged one in an hour’s time and then wait suspended at the hub or lurk in a nearby corner with dragline attached, waiting for dinner to arrive.

Maybe it’s true what they say about the insects and not man inheriting the earth. But one could argue for a third family of conquerors –– the spiders.

Spiders and insects are enemies and they are nothing alike. Remember your high school biology class mantra? A spider is an arachnid is not an insect. Speaking anatomically, insects have six legs and three body parts, and spiders have eight legs and only two body parts, which are a smallish cephalothorax and a much larger abdomen from which the silk is spun.

Over the millennia, it seems a delicate balance has been achieved between the two. Perhaps overstimulated by Star Wars scenes of alien creatures battling for the galaxy or Middle Earth face-offs between Hobbits and Orcs, we might imagine the insects and the spiders locked in some future war of Arthropod superpowers.

The insects definitely have the advantage of numbers (between one and ten million species, depending upon estimates) to overwhelm the spiders (numbering a mere 37,000 species worldwide).

But spiders have the cunning. Care to place any bets?