Along Came a Spider

Dateline:  June 10, 2011*

I mowed around the dead annual tickseed to give this guy a chance

I always get a little sad when it comes time to mow the meadow area of my yard. I know in my mind that it is the pathway to rejuvenation, yet I still try to mow around that one late bloomer. This week brought an additional dilemma. While mowing down the spent tickseed (Coreopsis spp.) in anticipation of rosy camphorweed (Pluchea baccharis) taking its place, I noticed a grouping that was covered with juvenile garden spiders. I steered around (I don’t use a rider, I have a self-propelled walkbehind) to save them from the fate of being swallowed up in the clipping catcher and having their tiny webs ruined. There are dozens of juveniles making a home in my yard this month.

I have dozens of juveniles throughout the front “meadow”

The Yellow Garden Spider, a.k.a. Black and Yellow Argiope (Argiope aurantia) is a large orbweaver that does not have a retreat near their web so they are usually found in its center. They like sunny areas among flowers, shrubs, and tall plants. They provide pest control and tend to stay in one place unless the web is frequently disturbed, or they can’t catch enough food there.

Sometimes they will grab a butterfly, but that’s all part of the food chain in action

They are easily identified by the stabilimentum (reinforced area) in web which is a vertical zigzag band above and below the middle of the web. Juveniles make a circular stabilimentum in the center of the web.

Yellow Garden Spiders are quite colorful

They can handle pests 200% larger than themselves such as this bird grasshopper or the lubber shown in the featured photo at top.

Like all spiders, black-and-yellow argiopes are carnivorous. They capture small flying insects such as aphids, flies, grasshoppers, wasps and bees and immobilize this prey with a venomous bite. A female can take prey up to 200% of her own size. They may bite humans if harassed, but this bite is considered harmless.

They disable leaf-footed bugs, a common pest

At night they will capture beetles that may try to come in the house

Yellow Garden Spiders are food for birds and lizards. They serve ichneumonid wasps and some flies which lay their eggs in the spider’s egg cases. One study found that in addition to Yellow Garden spiderlings, nineteen species of insects and eleven species of spiders emerged from their egg cases so they are an important species in our beautiful wildlife garden and should be accepted and appreciated. source

Spiders shed the exoskeleton several times as they grow

Just be certain they don’t have high hopes of taking on bigger prey! 😉

Be careful if they start looking at the neighbor’s horses

*This tale was originally published by Loret T. Setters on June 10, 2011 at the defunct national blog beautifulwildlifegarden[dot]com. Click the date to view reader comments.

Itzy and Bitzy…New Spiders for Me

The spider featured above is a male Jumping spider (Hentzia palmarum) who came to visit the goldenrod a couple of weeks back. Thought it was a good time to republish one of the lost posts from 2014, that featured the female of this species.

Dateline: December 5, 2014*

Paperwasps dine alongside Groundsel Beetle Larva

The Groundsel Bushes (Baccharis spp.) a.k.a. Saltbush have been a-buzz.  By far the most visited of all shrubs in my Florida native plant garden this week.  Various wasps and ants and beetles have been mining the leaves for tasty morsels of the Groundselbush Beetle (Trirhabda bacharidis) larvae and/or aphids or scales.

velvet ant isn’t an ant, it is a wasp.

I was surprised that many of the wasps and some other parasitoids were passing over the later instars of this beetle larva.  Then it dawned on me that they aren’t laying eggs or provisioning nests at this time of year, so little need to get family size packages.  Perhaps they are just enjoying eggs and the newly hatched larva. Is it possible that younger is tenderer? You know, like veal? 😉

Non-native Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle (Harmonia axyridis) were scouring leaves.

Ok, I have a vivid imagination, but that’s just how my thought process goes.  I’m not here to be the voice of reality; I’ll leave that to people with degrees on their wall.  There are plenty of edu websites where you can get the real skinny on exact terminology and step by step lifecycles. I just hope to make everyone think about what may be potentially happening in our gardens with the tales of the encounters in my beautiful wildlife garden as I experience them.

Hairy Maggot Blow Fly (Chrysomya sp. likely megacephala) looking for nectar? pollen?

On other plants, multitudes of pollinators are sucking in the sweet elixir that is the male flowers of this prolifically blooming species.

As I approached a different grouping of the Saltbushes, I noticed the tiniest of tiny red dots on a background of white silk.  I put the camera closer and snapped away.  The light was not the best and the results were less than stellar, but as you can see in this one shot, it was a miniscule spider.

Dwarf Spider (Ceraticelus sp.) certainly is tiny

At first I thought it was a Sheetweb Spider (Florinda coccinea) because of the coloring.  The web was all wrong though…those make lacy webs on the blades of low growing grass.

I nosed around bugguide and came up with an identification of what I believe to be a Dwarf Spider (Ceraticelus sp.).  They belong to the same family (Linyphiidae) as the above mentioned Sheetweb.  I’ll call this one Itzy 🙂

This silken housing seems a little different than the one of the dwarf spider

The next day I hoped to be able to gather additional photos of my new find. Spiders who create this style of web generally can be found for a few days in the same location.

hmmm, I don’t recognize YOU

I searched and searched the shrub I thought was the correct one.  Given that I have 25 or more groundsel plants scattered around the property, it was beginning to seem like a fruitless pursuit as I couldn’t be sure I was at the correct location.

Side view doesn’t help

Then I spotted two leaves stuck together with silk.  I kneaded them apart and a tiny creepy crawly danced out and down the stem of the branch.  I blindly snapped some photos.  The color was not reflective of the friend from the day before, but perhaps this new find was the predator.

Ahhh, you are in the jumping spider family (Salticidae)

I tend to think that they were two different webs.  Meet “Bitzy”, a Jumping Spider (Hentzia palmarum). As the common name indicates, prey is caught by jumping on it.

Although jumping spiders do not make webs to capture prey, they do use silk. Hunting spiders trail a dragline behind them to break their fall in case they miss a jump. Silken nests, ellipsoid structures with an opening at each end, are used for resting at night, molting, and egg-laying.”

You are eating something. Did you eat Itzy?

Whether or not Bitzy ate Itzy I may never know, but once again I have added two new species to my home buggy “life list”.  And the list keeps growing!

*This tale was originally published by Loret T. Setters on December 5, 2014 at the defunct national blog nativeplantwildlifegarden
beautifulwildlifegarden[dot]com. Click the date to view reader comments.