Science and sensibility

Any regular readers of Science and Sensibility will by now have worked out that I have done my usual trick of getting busy with my real life and letting these pages go to seed. One of the things I’ve been doing quite a lot of in my long absence is poking around spider webs with my camera. Our flat has a ‘garden’ which might be better described as a small grassy fallow land. We are hardly going to be part of a garden festival but the patch does seems to make a nice home for any number of gnats, flies and aphids and by extension the wasps, birds and spiders that make a meal of such things. So, in my first post in I don't know how many months, I am going to introduce to a few of my gardern's hunters. (If you happen to be one of my arachnophobic flatmates and you don't want to know what happens between you and the washing line may I suggest you make a run for it now).

I have found just about the hardest thing to in photographing spiders is actually finding them. It's simple enough to find their webs erected between shrubs or even (optimistically) attached to the house, but actually connecting a web to its maker can be hard work. For all their fearsome reputation as predators (there are no vegetarian spiders) spiders also make a tasty treat for birds and there are native wasps that give their young the best possible start in life by carrying off an anesthetised spider to their nest and laying eggs in the still living body. With those sorts of fates to avoid and prey to lure it is no surprise that spiders are masters of camouflage, the spiders depicted above and below are probably from the widespread genus Eriophora they are certainly both lying in wait.

You can see in the next photo (my favourite for what it’s worth) a thread of this spiders’ web is attached to its leg.

Through this thread the spider feels the tension of the web and in the words of John Davies

If aught do touch the utmost thread of it,
She feels it instantly on every side.