TAKIN’ A CLOSE LOOK—

I wandered across the dam early that sunny morning with my new macro lens looking for interesting, back-lit photo subjects.

That’s when a rapidly fluttering movement caught my eye. It was a fly-type critter caught in a spider web and working furiously to escape. I stepped carefully down over the crest of the dam and angled myself against the utility pole to stabilize the camera.

The web was attached between a bluebird nest box and the pole and sparkling in the early sunlight like crystallized embroidery thread.

I focused carefully on the condemned fly and was being mindful of the overall composition when—a visibly monstrous spider scrambled into my viewfinder and promptly chomped its breakfast into submission. Actually, this “monster”was about the size of a fingernail.


Nevertheless, the startling view made me appreciate being higher up on the food chain.

The victor in this natural skirmish was an orb weaver spider. Yup, I was about to learn that’s a spider that weaves a generally circular shaped web of remarkable, geometric precision—and strength.

In fact, I changed the composition to reveal more detail in the spider to help with its later identification (small photo lower right).

My friends at the Gorman Nature center referred my inquiry to their spider expert, Naturalist Jan Ferrell; the leader of an earlier expedition blog to a local eagle’s nest. She promptly offered an ID of Larinoides cornutus, Furrow Spider with a referral to a nifty web site by a professor friend of hers at The OSU Marion campus: http://www.marion.ohio-state.edu/spiderweb/mainpage.htm

In further research I learned these spiders begin their web construction by secreting a silk-like thread from their abdomen and dangling it in the breeze where it will eventually drift and attach itself by the spider’s supplied adhesive to some contact point.

This process is modified and repeated until the spider has its marvelously concentric web. It then hides off in a corner somewhere, constantly feeling the web for tell-tale vibrations caused by a newly captured prey.

If the prey is capable of defense, rather than chomping on it, the spider will simply immobilize it by spinning it into confinement; then bite it. Spiders cannot chew solid food so their venom causes the body of their prey to begin to liquefy which they then simply drink.

The marvels of both nature and knowledge are readily available when we simply take the time to look.