Miss Muffet Needn't Have Been So Frightened Female black and yellow argiope spider with her egg case. We have been watching and admiring a large black and yellow Argiope (ar-JIE-o-pea) spider whose home area includes the six-foot-tall showy goldenrod patch next to the rock wall east of our house. The ornate black and yellow markings on the abdomen of this inch and an eighth arachnid and the incredibly beautiful orb-web it spins are well-known features of this common creature. Now we have discovered our friend’s egg case and, upon close examination, wonder how such a delicate spider can make such a symmetrical and architectural wonder. The tan paper-like outer covering leads one to think that it is the product of one of the paper-making wasps rather than an eight-legged invertebrate. Its size is eleven-sixteenths by one inch. It is thought that, after constructing the urn-like receptacle, she stuffs into it her egg mass containing around 500 eggs. An intricate system of fine web-strands supports the case on all sides. How this fragile "nursery" will withstand the winds of a winter blizzard remains to be seen, but we will continue to watch it. Shortly after completing her egg-laying the female dies, having lived about one year, which is the average life span for the majority of spiders in our region. The eggs of the Argiope will hatch this autumn and the young spiderlings will remain in their winter home until warm weather arrives next spring when they will emerge and now be on their own. Search as I did, I couldn’t locate the male Argiope who measures only one-quarter to three-eighths of an inch in length. Supposedly he remained fairly near to the female all summer but didn’t mate with her until just before egg laying occurred quite recently. Chances are good that, upon having mated with the female she ate him, which is very likely why I couldn’t find him. Yikes! In other words you could say that she is a very good mother but a poor wife. All summer long the Argiope spiders consumed many hundreds of small flying insects, including flies, gnats, mosquitoes, moths, beetles, bees, grasshoppers, house flies and May-flies, that were all caught in the spiders’ "hunting nets," their amazing webs. Poison injected into their victims quickly quieted them down, after which only the blood was used by the spiders for nourishment. What valuable and efficient pest exterminators they are, working 24 hours a day. Their habitat is commonly among shrubbery, tall plants and flowers in meadows and gardens. The specimen I watched for several weeks last summer lived on one of the zinnia plants in the flowerbed along our front sidewalk. That one made me get down onto my belly in order to photograph it, while our friend this summer fortunately has been living at eye level. You may have seen one of the webs made by an Argiope spider. An easily observed characteristic of their web is the white zigzag band that runs vertically across the middle of the web. It always reminds me of a zipper. Young Argiopes are known to build more "zippers" in their webs. None of the references I consulted even hinted at a possible function of these interesting and telltale zigzag features. All the black and yellow Argiopes I watched and photographed in past years were hanging head down in the center of the webs. Most of them, upon the slightest disturbance, dropped quickly to the ground to hide. Orb-weaving spiders constitute a large family of around 2500 species found nearly all over the world. They tend to have poor vision so, unlike for example the wolf spiders that have excellent vision, they locate prey (caught in their webs) by feeling the vibration and change of tension of the threads in their webs rather than seeing their victims. Inedible materials are cut out of the web, dropped to the ground, and the web is then repaired. Spiders in general have been given a bad rap for centuries in spite of the fact that they appeared on Earth around 300 million years ago and literally carpet the planet today. The great entomologist-naturalist-writer, J. Henri Fabre, said, "…the spider’s poison is not serious for us and causes less inconvenience that a gnat bite." Only a few are to be feared. People either admire these solitary bandits of the animal world for their stealth and beauty of webs, of they abhor their poison and possible (but very slim) consequences of their bite. You can expect plenty of distortion of truth and gross exaggeration of the danger of spiders, perhaps leading back to "Little Miss Muffet." In answer to the frequently asked question, "What good are spiders?" –they do not harm our food supplies and production in any way, and it is estimated that the total weight of insects destroyed by spiders in a year exceeds the weight of the human population. Become a believer of a Kentish proverb: "If you wish to live and thrive, let a spider run alive!" This column appeared in the Door County Advocate on 09/22/2000. © Copyright 2000 Roy Lukes. All rights reserved.