Tiny Owl Dispatch No. 4: I Hate Spiders... And I Love Them, Too
The story of my friend, Olivia, and how she and my nature journal are helping me to overcome my fear of spiders
When Olivia showed up on my doorstep many, many summers ago, I wasn’t actually the best hostess. You see, I wouldn’t say I like it when guests show up unannounced. I need some warning to straighten up the house, make food, and psyche myself up (I’m an introvert, and we need time to prepare to entertain mentally).
But there she was, making herself at home in the bush next to my front steps and adjacent to the strawberry plants I had planted a couple of weeks before in my railing boxes, where incidentally a family of Japanese beetle had been dining for the last few days. She set up her quarters.
Her presence was creeping me out, and I had murderous thoughts.
I’m not proud of this. I’m not normally an aggressive person and would walk on my lips before engaging in an altercation of any sort, but I hate spiders.
No, let me be precise – I don’t hate them. I’m afraid of them.
Growing up all I heard were horror stories of how black widow spiders bit and killed people. BIT AND KILLED!!!! So in my vivid and visual imagination, the black widow became all spiders, and you can imagine the horror film that I conceived playing on a loop in my head.
My solution in the decades of adulting was to steer clear of spiders. I stayed on well-cleared trails and paths in the wild. I scanned my surroundings for the signs of a web during my walks. I always kept a glass and a thick piece of cardboard on the living room shelf in case I encountered one in my house.
A few things kept me from committing arachnicide against my new guest:
She wasn’t bothering, threatening, or otherwise menacing me in any way.
My curiosity outweighed my fear.
We are both spinners, lacemakers, and weavers.
Oh, and I named her Olivia. (Naming is a powerful act.)
Olivia was an Argiope aurantia, to be exact, commonly known as a garden spider. I know her by her other common name: Zipper spider for the zipper-like construction she weaves into her web.
The following section has a lot of scientific information interspersed with specific experiences with Olivia. For those of you who would rather skim for those “Olivia” specifics, the beginning phrases and sentences are in bold.
Scientific Name: Arigiope aurantia
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Arachnida
Order: Araneae
Family: Araneidae
Genus: Argiope
Species: Argiope aurantia
Body length
Males 5-9mm
Females 19-28mm
Common spider in the contiguous US, Hawaii, southern Canada, Mexico, and Central America.
From my nature journal:
Stepped out the front door and there she was to my left, weaving her web between the house, the bush, and the strawberry boxes. I loved watching her weave – she was so deft and graceful in her movements. As a fellow weaver, spinner, and lacemaker, I admired her “handwork.” Unlike my attempts, however, hers had a practical purpose. She was building her home.
Some interesting facts about Olivia
Olivia was an orb weaver. This is a common group of spiral wheel-shaped web builders found in gardens, fields, and forests. Some orb weavers build new webs every day (and tend to be active only in the evening) and some do not build webs at all. Olivia kept the same web throughout the summer except on two occasions that were weather-related:
She dismantled her web and hid under the leaves of the bush when a storm was imminent;
A Nor’easter took out her web and we thought she had perished, but within two days she had rebuilt and was back until the end of summer.
Zipper spiders only bite if disturbed or harassed. Their venom is harmless to non-allergic humans, similar to bee stings.
They eat a wide variety of garden pests like beetles, moths, wasps, and mosquitos. Olivia was partial to the Japanese beetles that plagued my strawberry plants that year.
These spiders do not live in dense location clusters like other orb weavers, and keep a clean, orderly web in comparison. (I had more in common with Olivia than I thought.)
Webs
They build their webs in sunny areas protected from the wind. Eaves of buildings and tall vegetation are where they feel most secure. Olivia lived in a tall bush next to the steps and nestled up against the strawberry boxes with its abundant supply of Japanese beetles.
The webs are circular and up to 60cm in diameter and get their incredible strength and resilience from their connecting threads. If a connection is broken the entire web becomes weak and collapses.
To construct the web, several radial lines are stretched among four or five anchor points that can be more than three feet apart. The radial lines meet at a central point. The spider makes a frame with several more radial lines and then fills the center with a spiral of silk, leaving a 7.9–9.5 mm (0.31–0.37 in) gap between the spiral rings, starting with the innermost ring and moving outward in a clockwise motion. To ensure that the web is taut, the spider bends the radial lines slightly together while applying the silk spiral.
Olivia’s web was magnificent, and it caught the morning sun so it looked like a fine silver threaded lace shawl stretched between the house and the bush, her wrapped-up prey sparkling like crystal beads.
The female builds a substantially larger web than the male's small zigzag web, often found nearby. The spider occupies the center of the web, usually facing straight down, waiting for prey to become ensnared in it. If disturbed by a possible predator, she may drop from the web and hide on the ground nearby. The web normally remains in one location for the entire summer, but spiders can change locations usually early in the season, perhaps to find better protection or better hunting.
Stabilimentum
The zipper formation is called a stabilimentum. Young spiders will put many stabilimentum in their webs, while mature spiders only have one.
Only spiders active in the day weave a stabilimentum into their webs. Olivia was active in the day. The only time I saw her retreat under the leaves of the bush was to get out of the scorching midday sun.
There is mystery surrounding the stabilimentum. Some scientists support the theory that it is a sign to predators to back off. Others say it is to attract prey. The entomologist at the nature center where I worked in college told me that the zipper spider pulls the center thread to quickly dismantle their webs and hide when a threat is imminent. Orb weavers do commonly dismantle their webs at night and build new ones in the morning, however, Argiope aurantia isn’t known to do that.
Entomologists really do not know what the “zipper” is for, but have a few theories as the fine scientists at Ask The Entomologists explain here.
Breeding
Males and females have different forms (sexually dimorphic), with the males being noticeably smaller and a bland, brown color.
The female breeds twice a year, laying her eggs between two sheets of silk that then get folded up into a teardrop-shaped sac placed either near the web or several feet from the web. I never saw Olivia with any companions that summer, nor did I see an egg sac.
The juveniles will disperse away from the egg sacs in the spring, catching wind currents on the silk they release (ballooning). Adults are too large to balloon.
Predators
The young spiders are susceptible to attacks from jumping spiders. Mud dauber wasps prey on the adult Arigiope aurantia. The adults will sometimes create a barrier web on the exterior edges of the web to keep predators from reaching the actual web as well as serve as a warning system.
And, of course, humans are their predators, but we don’t hunt them for food. We eradicate them as pests, but as Olivia taught me that summer she was a help, not a hindrance. Before she showed up, the Japanese beetles were decimating my strawberry plants. Zipper spiders are nature’s pesticides. They function as a balancing lever in the ecosystem making sure plant-eating insects do not destroy the woods and fields.
Conclusion: Do I still hate (fear) all spiders?
When Olivia was with us, I discreetly studied her every chance I had. I greeted her when leaving the house and when coming home, and checked her web daily. She had my gratitude for taking care of the beetles in my strawberry plants, and I’m not ashamed to admit we chatted - okay, I chatted, and she was a sympathetic listener. I don’t think I saw her roll any of her eight eyes even once.
I have to admit looking at the photos I took of her that summer and especially of other Zipper spiders gives me a tiny frisson of unease. Still, creating the nature journal spread and closely studying Olivia and her kind gave me knowledge and dispelled a lifelong fear born not out of fact, but from a child’s imagination fueled by the biases of the adults around her.
This experience – remembering and journaling about it – is a reminder that we all have a role to play in the health of our ecosystem. In this instance, Olivia’s role was to restore the balance between insect and plant life.
Mine was to not interfere with the task Mother Nature gave her.
xoSusannah