And that's where it gets stressful. I run out of spiders before the end of the month. This year, I have plenty of spiders, but they're all the same species; cellar spiders, Pholcus phalangioides. I crawled around my house today, searching in all the corners, on the underside of the furniture, around the baseboards, behind the plants; cellar spider, cellar spider, family of cellar spiders, more cellar spiders. The only other spiders I found were the sad remains of cellar spider lunches.
It has been raining and blowing, but I went outside and looked; there had to be at least one other spider somewhere! No. Only more cellar spiders. I think they've eaten everyone else.
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| Cellar spider female eating her unlucky mate. |
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| Another cellar, eating the last of the big house spiders. |
Cellar spiders look delicate and flimsy, and they're usually small, but somehow they're able to capture and eat the largest and hungriest of their relatives. And huge crane flies, many times their size and weight.
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| Today's cellar spider, just hanging out. |
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| And another one from this afternoon, eating something small. |
I'm going to end up posting rubber spiders from the dollar store if this keeps up.
Nice spider photos .... just walk down the street and my neighborhood is full of Halloween spiders ... but I guess they don't count.
ReplyDeleteCome up to the cabin, I must have a spider behind the woodstove from the looks of the web. It's spiky threads running in all directions with no real organization. I haven't gone back there yet to see what I might find. - Margy
ReplyDeleteSounds like a house spider, one of the Steatodas. They make really messy webs and like warm corners. I can usually find one behind a bookcase or my desk, but not this month; the cellar spiders must have eaten them all.
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