Really starnge thing happened this evening.

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

After a long day of yard work, my friend and I were sitting on the deck with a couple beers as the sun set, and talking on some deep topics. I had my arm across the deck chair arm and sticking out. I felt something brush across my wrist, and thought it was just a flying bug. Half a minute later I felt it again and looked to see what it was. A garden orb weaver ( AKA "night Spider" - we have them everywhere outside) was building a web from the umbrella to a bush about eight feet away, and using my arm as the lower attachment point. She would scamper up the thread, move over a few inches, drop down to my wrist and attach the next thread. We watched her do this half a dozen times. She just thought I was part of the chair. I figured I better stop it, so I carefully took the threads and hooked them on the end of the chair arm. She at first raced to the bush, and then came back to check the thread at the chair. She did some repairs, and went back to building her orb. When we went in, she was well on her way to finishing a 8X4X6 foot triangular web. All this happened within a foot or two of my face.

As some of you know, I really like spiders. I sit out and watch them spin webs, and when one builds where it is inconvenient for us, I move her to a safer place. I never kill a spider unless absolutely necessary ... unless it is a black widow. I love to photograph black and yellow argiope ( AKA banana spiders) when they are close to laying their eggs. There are many other argiope spiders that are really neat looking, too.

 

[john april]

you are one with nature. i thought the story was going to end with you getting bitten

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

A spider bite is a rare event unless you are doing something harmful to the spider and they can't escape. Spiders don't eat people, and thus have no reason to bite us. Even poisonous spiders don't bite without provocation.

I regularly gently scoop up a spider in my hand ( or just grab her web strand) to carry it away from a door and move it to a bush or tree around the side of the house. As far as I am concerned, a million spiders would be good around my house. Maybe they could eat up all of the d@&&ed mosquitoes.

BTW, almost all webs are spun by female spiders. The little guys hanging around the side are males. If he is luck, he may get lucky. If he isn't, he gets eaten. In many species, even after getting lucky, he gets eaten. Despite what human males may think, with the exception of the more advanced vertebrates, nature has very little use for males. Most of the time nature has only one use for males, and when that is done, they are of no more use. In colony insects, a female mates once as a youth and has enough sperm for the rest of her reproductive life (now you know the evolutionary reason we shoot 250 million sperm cells to fertilize one or two egg cells). All males are then killed or driven away. Most insect males usually don't live more than a week anyway.

Side comment:
We were listening to the cicada singing out on the deck. As we start into the new moon, we are having a brood hatch, and the evening is filled with waves of screeching cicada. One starts, and then the rest join in for about 30 seconds. It dies off and starts again in a short while. This goes on for hours, and lasts for a couple days. I recall the huge brood hatches in the mid 1960's and the mid 90's when you almost had to yell to talk over them during the peak of the hatch.
Everything around the shop and yard has dozens of cicada shells where the cicada dug out of the ground during the night, climbed up and attached their feet, and molted. They then climb up a tree/wood post/etc. and let their wings dry. Once hardened, they fly up to the trees and wait for dusk to start calling for mates. The guys with the best singing and loudest sound get the mates. After mating the males soon fall dead and there will be them laying all over the roadways and sided walks. The females will cut a slit in a pencil size branch and lay their eggs. Then they die and fall on the ground under the trees. The larva will hatch in the late fall, eat their way out of the branch, and fall to the ground. They will dig down a foot and a half to two feet and find some tree roots to feed on. These guys will stay there and grow for 17 years (different species have different periods) until the earth's biorhythms tell them it is time to repeat the cycle.

 

[Willie71]

Very cool story. My son is like this too. Animals of all sorts would come to him, as if he was just part of their world.I've seen him reach into the enclosures of some of the nastiest aggressive snakes and reptiles we has when we bred reptiles, and he would drape them over his neck. Never got bit.

 

[jdm61]

I was aware of the cicada phenomenon, but I did not know that when they come up out of the ground is not dependent on which species they are but their location. All 7 of the long period 13 or 17 year bugs synchronize with each other in a particular brood. The BIG brood, the one they call the Great Eastern Brood is supposed to come up out of the ground in 2021. The wink article implied that 2020, they year before the appearance, might be a very good year for you if you are a wild turkey hunter but not if you have moles in your yard. Apparently the cicada nymphs are easy targets for those guys about a year before they pop up.

A spider bite is a rare event unless you are doing something harmful to the spider and they can't escape. Spiders don't eat people, and thus have no reason to bite us. Even poisonous spiders don't bite without provocation.

I regularly gently scoop up a spider in my hand ( or just grab her web strand) to carry it away from a door and move it to a bush or tree around the side of the house. As far as I am concerned, a million spiders would be good around my house. Maybe they could eat up all of the d@&&ed mosquitoes.

BTW, almost all webs are spun by female spiders. The little guys hanging around the side are males. If he is luck, he may get lucky. If he isn't, he gets eaten. In many species, even after getting lucky, he gets eaten. Despite what human males may think, with the exception of the more advanced vertebrates, nature has very little use for males. Most of the time nature has only one use for males, and when that is done, they are of no more use. In colony insects, a female mates once as a youth and has enough sperm for the rest of her reproductive life (now you know the evolutionary reason we shoot 250 million sperm cells to fertilize one or two egg cells). All males are then killed or driven away. Most insect males usually don't live more than a week anyway.

Side comment:
We were listening to the cicada singing out on the deck. As we start into the new moon, we are having a brood hatch, and the evening is filled with waves of screeching cicada. One starts, and then the rest join in for about 30 seconds. It dies off and starts again in a short while. This goes on for hours, and lasts for a couple days. I recall the huge brood hatches in the mid 1960's and the mid 90's when you almost had to yell to talk over them during the peak of the hatch.
Everything around the shop and yard has dozens of cicada shells where the cicada dug out of the ground during the night, climbed up and attached their feet, and molted. They then climb up a tree/wood post/etc. and let their wings dry. Once hardened, they fly up to the trees and wait for dusk to start calling for mates. The guys with the best singing and loudest sound get the mates. After mating the males soon fall dead and there will be them laying all over the roadways and sided walks. The females will cut a slit in a pencil size branch and lay their eggs. Then they die and fall on the ground under the trees. The larva will hatch in the late fall, eat their way out of the branch, and fall to the ground. They will dig down a foot and a half to two feet and find some tree roots to feed on. These guys will stay there and grow for 17 years (different species have different periods) until the earth's biorhythms tell them it is time to repeat the cycle.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

There are over 20 broods. Most are 17 year cycle and about four or five are 13 year cycle. There are a few other sub-species and cousins that have shorter cycles. Sometimes part of a brood emerge a year or two early or late. I don't recall if they know why. When a 13, 17, and off year brood all hatch at the same time in one area it is a super brood. The noise can be unbelievable at the peak of these hatches.

The broods are all numbered, and we are in brood 5 right now, They like to write it in Roman numerals, so we are in Brood V. Brood X seems to get all the press for some reason.

Not every year has a brood hatch anywhere, and not every area has the current years brood in it. Virginia is in a range that covers several broods, so we get a good hatch about every three to five years. The Appalachian mountain rang, from GA to NY, is the site of the highest concentration.

 

[timos-]

growing up in new jersey in the mid 90s...there were shells everywhere and the sound really was deafening. Recently watch a show on netflix about the possible reasoning behind these life cycles, pretty interesting stuff.
We like insects around here too and I dont mind a few of those spiders with the tiny bodies and really long legs to hang out in a corner or two of my house. they build relatively small webs and get the annoying moths. We had the privilege of watching one tend to a moth that got caught in its web one night. It was very fast, about the only time ive ever seen them move faster than a slug. This year however, something happened. The first year we moved in there was one or two, the next year 3 or 4, this year though theres about 20 and Ive had to start removing them!

 

[Atlas Knife Company]

Not sure about the brood here, but in Iowa we have large amounts of cicada EVERY year. Some neighborhoods are quiet, mine isn't. Only once have I ever heard what I would call deafening. Driving down the interstate, windows up, I heard the cicada in a group of trees outside. I rolled down the window and couldn't believe how loud they were. It was so loud that I could barely hear the highway noise at 75 MPH over them.