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Day and Night Photos of Sasha, the barn spider
Neoscona hentzi and weaving a web
Here is our barn spider (Neoscona hentzi - I originally misclassified
here as Eriphora transmarina or old name: Araneus cavaticus )
- quite a bit larger than the original Sasha (Alexandra). Were my
earlier photos of Sasha as a juvenile spider? Is she now a mature adult or
is she a different spider?
Sept 25 morning
She is very very shy. In the early morning, when she is in the center of her
web, if I make a small motion that disturbs her web - she races up one of the
supporting silk threads and hides in a crack of the bark of a palmetto tree. I
have waited for 15 min for her to reappear, but nothing. She then destroys her
web - and hide, I suppose, all day. In the early evening, she rebuilds her
web - and tonight (Sept 25), I found her resting quietly and less shy than
in full daylight. I made a couple of flash photos, with fixed focus.
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Here is a photo of her ( Araneus cavaticus from behind (click
for supersize), suspended from a single fiber of her web. She hunts by night
and hides in a shady spot during the day. Her web is often absent after
7 or 8 am - and I think she eats it, though I have yet to catch this behavior.
In the early morning, she is very shy and will race to her hiding place
with only the slightest provocation.
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Here is what she looks like from the top (click for larger photo)
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September 26 morning: She has caught something and is wrapping, inspecting, eating and who knows what else. Here are two presentations of her
evening web (click for larger photo)
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Here are two views of Sasha, after catching a small insect, wrapping it in
silk, and then holding it, to figure out what to do while some crazy guy is
making flash photos of whatever I'm doing. (click for larger photo)
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Here she is, enjoying the results of an evening's hunt. I am not sure what
the insect is - but its either a small moth or cockroach. On the right,
you can see that she has removed part of the silk casket in order to inject
venum and enjoy a tasty treat.
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Here she is, on the left, hiding from me (I distrubed her web and she scrambled
away to her daytime hiding place. On the right, she is continuing to
explore her breakfast. (click for larger photo)
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Cristi was convinced there were only 6 legs, so I returned to plead with
Sasha, that she display, unambiguously,
all 8 legs, and, to my surprise, she displayed, unambiguously, all 8 legs
while apparently enjoying a tasty treat.
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September 27 morning. (7am)
I went to find Sasha - and when she saw me approaching
her web, she raced from her home in the palmetto tree. She stopped long
enough for me to make a couple of photos shown here.
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Here is her hiding place - can you find her hairy legs
just below the ivy leaf? Click over the image in order to see her legs and
the orientation of her body (head down). In the next photo, you will see that
she has oriented her legs in a parallel manner, pointing up.
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I returned after about 30 minutes, and found that she had buried her head in
the surrounding stuff and extended some of her legs vertically. I
wonder if this is how she sleeps during the day?
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I returned again after a week. Sasha has rotated her web by 90 degrees - to
avoid the constant flow of people that become entangled in her web and
destroy a good night's hunt. I pointed my camera into her hiding place
and sure enough, there she was. If you click on the photos you'll see
a super-size picture of her hiding and if you look carefully just above the center, you'll see 4 small shiny black dots, that I believe are 4 of her 8 eyes.
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Its now October 26 and Sasha has been building webs irregularly.
Usually,
I find her hanging out near her hiding place during the night -
and back to her
usual hiding place during the day. The night temps are in the 50s (F) so
perhaps this is in response to the cooler weather. Anyway, last night
she was weaving a new web, and this morning I went to watch her destroy it
and perhaps capture it on film. She was resting at 6am - 7am and 8am so
I started to make photos of her because there was more natural light than
usual. While walking around her web (the midpoint is about 2 meters above
ground), I suddenly saw that the web was almost perfectly planar - and
so it was time to capture this. Here you can see the almost flat plane
of her web with her resting, as if skating on a lake of ice.
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