The little yellow crab spider remained almost unnoticeable until it moved from the yellow blossom to the green leaves. With their first four legs are larger than the hind legs, crab spiders have the capability of walking forward, backward, or sideways like a crab.
Goldenrod Crab Spider
Sometimes when the dew is heavy in the morning and after the sun peeks out, you can find some interesting things coated with dewdrops like spiderwebs and even the spider legs collected drops.
Dewdrop Spiderweb
My face encountered several spider webs while I was mowing lawn today but not all spiders build webs as some just lie in wait for lunch to wander into their hunting range. The Goldenrod Crab Spider will their color to yellow or white, depending on which flower they are hunting so they are often on daisies, sunflowers, and goldenrod. These spiders change color by secreting a liquid yellow pigment into the outer cell layer of the body but the process is not a quick change as it take 10 to 25 days to go from white to yellow but the opposite color change takes about six days. Since the daises are fading as summer rolls on, I imagine most are changing to yellow to match the later summer flowers.
Waiting to Attack
The spider may have caught a fly in its web but the web silks also collected some dewdrops on a misty day. The term cobweb typically means an abandoned web whereas a spider web implies an active web, like this one where the spider is still trapping insects for lunch.
A Dewy Web
The underside of the Yellow Garden or Writing spider doesn’t catch your eye like its bright yellow back does, but the zigzag in its spiderweb does stand out. The dense zigzag of silk is known as a stabilimentum, but its purpose is disputed. Some say it acts as camouflage for the spider to hide behind, to attract insect or even warn birds that there is a web present.
The Zigzag
The black-eyed susans to me always means summertime, the hotter part of summer. The flowers draw insects to them and even spiders that blend into the yellow petals. The Goldenrod Crab Spider blends in with the yellow flowers and ambush their prey instead of weaving webs.
Goldenrod Crab Spider
This might not be “Charlotte” writing in the web for Wilbur, but there is a pig nearby and there is some extra markings in the web as the Zipper or Writing spider makes a zigzag pattern in the web. Argiope aurantia is commonly known as the black and yellow garden spider, zipper spider, corn spider, and writing spider. The females are much larger than the males and this female is wrapping up a snack so she had plenty to eat as she makes her egg sac which can contains between 400 and 1400 eggs.
Zipper Spider
With the new snowfall, there is very little color on the landscape, and certainly no bright yellow flowers. Bright flowers and even colorful spiders won’t reappear for a few more months.
This successful spider, carrying its latest victim, is called the goldenrod crab spider or flower (crab) spider, because it is commonly found hunting in goldenrod sprays in the autumn. The goldenrod attracts a large numbers of insects and therefore, the older female spider will prey there to produce the best possible clutch of eggs.
Younger females will hunt on a variety of flowers such as daisies and sunflowers and are able to change their color to yellow or white. The color change takes several days to complete.
The goldenrod crab spider does not build webs but instead they ambush their prey and they have small jaws with venom to take on larger insects.
Goldenrod Crab Spider
I know this won’t be a popular photo due to it’s subject matter but I was sad to see that the highway department had cut the road ditches and cut many of the lilies I was taking pictures of the other day and they cut down where this Black and Yellow Argiope spider had built her web. (Also called Yellow Garden Spider, Writing Spider, Yellow Garden Orb Weaver, or Golden Orb-weaver.)
I had almost run into the web as I was weaving in and out of the lilies taking pictures. I got close enough that I scared the spider off her pretty web that has what looks like a zipper in the middle of the web. It always amazes me how they can build a web with such a fancy design and so delicate. (I always called them the zipper-stitched spider because of the pattern on the web.)
I had stopped yesterday to verify what kind of lilies they were since I didn’t take close up of the bottom leaves and hadn’t stopped a second time since it was solid poison ivy all around the lilies. I realized that since I was watching how I stepped on the poison ivy, I never took a picture of her web, only where I scared her to and now the web is gone.
(Course I was taking a different spider picture yesterday, a bright solid yellow one and I got a little too close as she climbed onto my camera and then put a web silk across my lens. So I have another spider picture to show some day.)
Black and Yellow Argiope
