Friday arachnid blogging; or, Had we but web enough, and time

Are you a shy man? Can't bring yourself to chat up that hot babe at the bar? If so, take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. Even among your very distant spider cousins there are those who cannot screw their courage to the sticking point.

Late one August night in New York I saw a female spider sitting in the middle of her large orb web. She looked like a member of the genus Araneus, but apparently of a North American species (A. cavaticus, perhaps?) that is not familiar to me.

She wasn't doing much. She was just sitting there, as araneids are wont to do when there is no prey on their web. But another spider was doing something.

It was a male, cautiously inching his way down one of the structural lines supporting the web. So far as I know araneids do not attack their conspecifics on their webs; he can only have been after one thing. Down he crawled, until he reached the outermost of the web's spiral lines. Here he paused. Then, carefully, he began gently plucking the strand. He'd pluck a few times, then wait; pluck, and wait. He was acting sensibly. Most spiders are solitary, and aggressive. In many cases, a close encounter between two spiders, even of the same species, ends with a single well-fed spider. And this male, as is often the case in the spider world, was significantly smaller than his belle. Like insects, spiders are believed to use pheromones in their mating behaviour; that's probably how he identified the female's web when he happened across its anchoring line in the tree above. But as the lovers move to their tryst, visual or (in the case of the weak-eyed araneids) tactile signals take over. By making stereotyped plucking movements at the edge of the web, the male was saying, 'Honey, I'm home! And not for dinner!'

His plucking did not seem to elicit much response from the female, though. I thought I saw her, very occasionally, make a very slight movement with her first and second left legs. Was she sending a signal back? Her movements were so faint that I cannot be sure she was, but if so, the message was apparently not 'come hither'. After a few minutes, the male turned round and shimmied back up the line to the tree. After about twenty minutes he returned and began the process again. The slow descent down the web's structural line; the plucking at the outer edge of the spiral; and then the retreat to the tree. I watched him do this five times over the course of two hours. ('Have you nothing better to do with your time?' you are no doubt asking. In fact at that moment I had not. My camera is not at its best under those circumstances, as you can see readily enough from the photos, but I was prepared to invest a bit of time on the chance I'd capture some Spider Porn.)

But two hours was time enough, and eventually I went off to bed. I do not know whether the female's suitor eventually persuaded her to give it up. The sad fact, though, is that it wouldn't have mattered if he had. Spiders of this sort spend their days in a hiding place. The female in question, as it turns out, had chosen a secluded spot under the rim of an outdoor gas grill. The next day, alas, saw things grilled. The spider was not consumed in the flames (she was well away from them), but the heat was sufficient to kill her. The grill's a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.