Spiders rarely get much empathy, in real life or in fiction. Often depicted as scary, evil, repulsive, deadly, malevolent, and horrible, they seem for many, to personify, or arachnify, the worst aspects of the natural world. Consider Shelob, the notorious spider of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote that she was “an evil thing in spider-form…and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of elves and men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow.” Now, that is not a beast to trifle with.

In a more Charlotte-esque take, for the last month or two, I have been privy to watching a far more benign spider, at least in regard to elves and men. She sits just outside my office window in a handsome web of her own making. As is wont for her species, Araneus diadematus (the cross spider), she rests head down in the center of her web, waiting with one leg attached to a guy wire, or signal line. When a potential meal triggers the line, she takes off to nab the soon to be dead visitor.

I have been privileged to watch several times as she immobilizes a house fly with a bite. The toxin she injects paralyzes the victim, which she then swaddles in silk. Each time I see her capture her meal, I am amazed by how quickly she wraps her victim, usually in about minute, rotating the bug, as if it is a rotisserie. When completed she has nice, tidy bundle, ready to be eaten, like a satisfying burrito, rich in nutrition and texture. She then returns to the center of the web, I assume sated until another fly or butterfly inadvertently pops in for a pre-meal stop.

Although the web appears to be in the same place, as if she’s set up a long term tenancy, I know that is an illusion. Each web I see is probably new, for she, like most orb weaving spiders regularly eats her web. Webphagia keeps her web in pristine, ready-for-the-next-victim mode and supplies nutrients. One study found that about 25% of a spider’s diet consisted of pollen captured in the sticky spirals of their web and the other 75% consisted of flying insects, mainly small dipterans and hymenopterans.

What this study failed to note is that female cross spiders also consume potential mates. Fortunately, other researchers have not overlooked this arachnidian dining delight. Two British researchers found that the much smaller males are eaten up to 25% of the time, typically before copulation, when placed in proximity to a female. Males do not benefit in any way from this behavior (duh!), whereas females clearly do, by bulking up on a food source that was an evolutionary dead end, as well as one with the precise nutritional requirements to produce eggs. Females ate only smaller males; the Brits hypothesized that females perhaps understood that bigger males had a talent to feed themselves, and thus would pass this trait onto their progeny.

I know that I don’t have much longer to watch the spider outside my window. With winter coming, she is winding down her desire for food and for life. Hopefully, she hasn’t made a romantic meal out of all her suitors and will soon build a cocoon to house the hundreds of eggs she’ll lay. The next spring, the adorable, half-a-lentil-sized, yellow babies will emerge. En masse.

We have been fortunate to encounter this writhing gang of wrigglers several times. Once the spiderlings popped out on the handle part of our backyard gate and once on the door to our backyard cottage. We were slightly inconvenienced but did our best not to wound or kill the babies. They were far too cute, plus, I knew that soon they’d be big enough to head out into our garden and around our house to eat their fair share of bugs, including mosquitoes. Thanks Spiders. Happy Halloween.

By the way, spiders are notoriously hard to identify. Typically one needs a microscope to key out the species, often relying on a careful focus on their genitalia. But that’s a discussion for another time. The spider outside my window, however, sports a highly identifiable feature. On her back is a distinct white cross, clearly standing out against her tan body. The many names of this species include cross spider, European garden spider, and crowned orbweaver spider. They are not native to the PNW, having been introduced from Europe. One thing I often consider when I don’t know the identity of an organism; what I see is common, meaning I go with the species most likely to be there, not some seldom seen species.

When we were in Japan, we regularly encountered this species, the Joro spider (Trichonephila clavata). Native to east Asia, they have a three inch leg span and can build webs up to ten feet across. We usually saw them on the side of the trail but in one, rarely hiked section, about a mile long, they spanned the trail and we had to walk with a hiking pole held in front of us like a narwhal’s tusk. I am typically pretty chill with spiders but these big ones were a bit much and their webs super sticky. By the way, they have now been found in the US, in the south. Who knows how long before they reach the PNW?

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