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Home Movie

It's always best to start on a bright note. And it's hard to get much brighter than a new batch of spiderlings.

I went around the back to take the trash out two weeks ago and caught sight of this web. At first, I thought it was plastered with struggling fruit flies (I've had to start wearing glasses this year). Closer inspection revealed these awfully pretty youngsters, scrambling busily past each other, each laying down line after line of silk. I'm almost certain they're Argiope aurantia, commonly known as black and yellow garden spiders.

They're gone now. But there is a small orb web in the same location, containing two silk zigzags reaching away from each other on opposite sides of the web's hub. As we discuss in Spider Silk, these zigzags have led to argiopes being known in some locales as writing spiders. So it seems likely at least one of these little beauties has decided to stick around.
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