Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

It is springtime in Charleston and this means that already, baby barn spiders (Neoscona arabesca) are building webs in the early evening and tearing them down in the early morning. I find looking for the spring appearance of these and other spiders now even more interesting now that I am armed with the ideas from Freyssinet and how to build stay cables.

I continue to be curious about the web demolition in the early morning and have yet to to capture this. It seems to be much easier to catch these young spiders as they weave their webs. (Explore the web building of adult Neoscona arabesca, that I captured two years ago (2003) Sasha was my first experience with a barn spider.)

June 10, 2005: update Finally I caught the early morning web destruction. What I saw was that she does not eat her web, but rather prepares a small bundle of web and attached bugs. So, perhaps she is harvesting the nightly catch of insects - mostly mosquitoes and no-see-'ems. In any event, the next opportunity, I shall try to catch the unbuilding of her web with so video.

Again here is a barn spider, an orb weaver, from our garden. They typically build their webs in the early evening and then in the early dawn, they destroy them. It is now spider season in Charleston, and so last night I went spider hunting in our garden. I was not disappointed, and found two partial webs. The spiders are about 1/4" in diameter and a real challenge for photos. All my attempts were out of focus. So early this morning (5:30am) I returned, with camera mounted on a tripod and to my surprise, she was weaving a new web. Apologies for the focus - no light, and with a slight breeze, the web was moving in and out of the focal plane. But you can get some ideas. Here is the web: