Favorite Spiders

     Three kinds of spiders, including black and yellow garden spiders, Carolina wolf spiders and six-spotted fishing spiders, are my favorites.  These interesting species show some of the diversity among spiders in the eastern United States, including here in southeastern Pennsylvania.  I have seen all of them many times and am thrilled with each sighting.
     Female garden spiders' bodies are up to an inch long, not including their legs.  They have short, silvery "hair" on their thoraxes and strikingly beautiful, yellow and black patterns on their abdomens.  But these large, colorful spiders are most famous for their rounded, vertical webs that are over a foot in diameter and placed between tall grass and weed stalks in sunny habitats.  They use those large, silky webs, which are numerous and quite visible, particularly in late summer and early autumn, as nets to snare flying insects of many kinds.
     Those big webs are beautiful, like whimsical works of art, especially during sunrises in late-summer and fall mornings when innumerable droplets of dew reflect the sun's rays, making the webs sparkle like millions of tiny diamonds.  Overgrown fields of these webs are breath-taking.
     A much smaller male garden spider makes his own web in an outlying part of a female's web, and adds that vertical, white band of contorted webbing in the middle of her web.  After the pair mates, the female lays several eggs in a round sac, up to one inch wide, that appears to have a papery cover.  Then she attaches that baby nursery to a side of the web and dies soon afterward.  The young hatch in fall, overwinter in their nursery and emerge the next spring as tiny editions of their mother.
     Carolina wolf spiders, like all members of their family of spiders, don't make webs.  Instead, they quickly stalk across leaf-covered, woodland floors in pursuit of invertebrates, mostly at night, as wolves hunt big game.  This species of wolf spider has a body about three-quarters of an inch long, eight legs, as all spiders do, and eight dark eyes in three rows on the head.  And Carolina wolf spiders have light-brown, sparse "hair" all over their bodies and legs.  That hair allows them to be camouflaged on forest floors.          
     Each female wolf spider spins a round, white egg sac in which she lays dozens of eggs, attaches that tiny pouch to her spinnerets at the end of her abdomen and drags it around behind her as she hunts invertebrates to eat.  When the babies hatch, they climb onto their mother's back for safety until they are ready to care for themselves.  
     Six-spotted fishing spiders resemble wolf spiders, don't spin webs and are unique in that they stalk insects, tadpoles and tiny fish among water plants in the shallows of ponds and slow streams.  They even put a couple of legs in the water to feel for aquatic prey.
     Six-spotted fishing spiders have bodies up to three-quarters of an inch long and a leg span of two and one-half inches.  They are mostly brown, which allows them to blend into their surroundings, have eight eyes in two rows and a yellow line along each flank from the front of the head to the tip of the abdomen.
     Each female fishing spider uses silk to make a nursery web to lay eggs in.  She carries that rounded egg sac under her body until hatching time.  Then the female creates a nursery web and suspends that sac among the strands.  She rests nearby until the spiderlings areold enough to disperse.
     All spiders are interesting little critters, and each family of them have beauty and unique characteristics.  Watch for them when outdoors.  They are almost everywhere.