I'm not a big fan of spiders. Most spiders around here are harmless and they provide a very valuable service of capturing those annoying flying, biting insects. I feel that the spiders and I have an agreement of detente. If they build their webs outside and out of the way, we can co-exist. If they venture inside the house, there will be consequences. These beautiful spiders pictured here are called golden orb-weavers. They are on the large size as spiders go. These ones have a body length of around 2 inches and as you can see they have even longer legs.
I found these 2 hanging in their artistically woven web that they'd anchored between the chicken coop and a nearby heliconia plant. It was early morning and the fine silk thread still held droplets of morning dew. We often see their webs through the high windows in our bedroom. They build extensive webs between the top roof and the lower shade roof over our 2nd floor balcony. We leave these webs undisturbed for months at a time and the industrious spiders spin more and more layers until the web is thick with captives. Occasionally, M brings the tall step ladder from the garage and sets it up in the guest bedroom to climb out the upper windows onto the shade roof. He takes the spider web buster brush and rolls it through the web until the brush looks like a gigantic plume of dirty grey cotton candy. If one of these arachnids moves inside the house, they tend to stay up
in the high corners of the ceiling. We have mobiles hanging in several corners of our rooms. One time I noticed that the mobile in the guest bedroom was no longer spinning in the air current. Not only was it static but the bottom of the mobile was fixed at an odd angle to the corner of the wall. On closer observation, I could see that a spider had decided the mobile structure was a good anchor for its web. After a couple of swipes of the spider buster, the mobile was free to spin again.
Unknowingly, I was a little too "up close and personal" with a golden orb weaver one morning. We sleep under a dome of 2 mosquito nets. The nets are layered one over the other to give us a little extra protection from the pervasive no-seeums. When I woke up and got out of bed, I wasn't paying attention to anything in particular. Bit when I returned to bed just before lifting the netting, M pointed to a golden orb weaver that was placidly hanging between the 2 layers about midway up the net on my side of the bed. I gently corralled it into our insect "catch and release" yogurt tub container and relocating the spider to the balcony and I encouraged it to find another location to hang.
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