cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/4768804
Taken on a Samsung phone (plus a small bit of tinkering)
Very pretty, even if orb-weavers always trigger my flight response hard with their chunky physiques and tapered thin legs.
Darn you biology, let me appreciate my neighbours more.
They don’t bother me like that, probably because I know that they’re always outside just chilling in their web…I think I’ve managed to overcome my primal instincts regarding creepy crawlies and snakes and so on, in that I’ll try and catch them and pick them up for a closer look
It probably helps that I live in the UK though, and not Australia or other tropical place…they have some mental things there
Yeah, I am Australian. Honestly the dangers are overblown, but there are still a few spiders that make me go a bit wobbly inside.
Orb-weavers (different genus though) are one of them to a tiny degree, not because they’re dangerous, or even fast. It’s because they have thick webs that they spin every single damn night and you accidentally walk through them. And then they freak out while you’re freaking out… and they can really grip on to you.
I don’t go walking through gardens at night in some areas anymore, I’m happy to appreciate them from a distance. But I still feel that instinctive “do not want” deep down.
Yep, there’s nothing quite like that unnerving feeling of walking face first into a spider web
Orb-weavers (different genus though)
You are probably dealing with Hortophora transmarina, the “Australian garden orb weaver spider”, though you probably don’t call it Australian in Australia.
I always thought they were very considerate spiders because they are nocturnal and, as you said, build a new web every night. So they actually take it down during they day. Most orb-weavers won’t do that for you.
Some of them are definitely those, but we get a bunch of different ones.
The night thing is polite, until you come home after dark one day, and there is limited light on a pathway. Keep in mind that wintertime daylight hours makes that “most of the time” in many places too.
You’ll be tiredly fumbling for your keys while peering carefully to see the reflections of webs, and they’re completely unpredictably placed because of the nightly rebuilding. Your morning memory of their location is now useless. This was admittedly a much bigger problem before mobile phone flashlights were a thing.
The more permanent web-builders you can at least reliably coax into more convenient places with a little bit of strategic web destruction. You might get a badly placed solitary structural web strand from that spider the next day, but those are not sticky and usually spider-free.
It wouldn’t be such a bother if paths weren’t one of their favourite places to build. And they didn’t have widespread communities that have thrived with human occupation.
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I was always stoked to run into their cousins in, like, the US states Georgia and South Carolina. So bright! Such cool webs.
And proper webs too! Nice and prominent with the owner sat in the middle :)
The day after I took this photo we came back for another walk, just as a bee unfortunately flew into the web. I was going to try and rescue the bee, but it would have been covered in web and basically doomed anyway…so we let the spider deal with it
Here’s all the action https://lemmy.ml/post/4729765
That looks like a yellow jacket/wasp rather than a honey bee. One of those is a lot less my friend.
I’ve had a look through my field guides, and yes, I think you’re right
![[OC] Orb Spider (Araneus diadematus)](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/98132191-3b4c-461c-bc05-2b1f0ff459c9.jpeg){kind=link}