25 August 2007

Spider

This adult female golden silk spider (Nephila clavipes) was living next to my local dumpster. I thought it was pretty so I took some pictures. It's about three inches long, top feet to bottom feet.

spider side view spider tummy view

There's a smaller one living in my mailbox, which just had a bunch of baby spiders. But it doesn't come out to be photographed. I occasionally see some of its legs through the grate, and lots of yellow web.

2 comments:

robertsloan2art said...

This is freaky. I didn't know they were real. I've been putting silk spiders into my novels for a while now, they get bred and fed to produce different colors and tamed like silkworms on Piarra... and it does yellow? Way cool. I want a peacock blue one. lol

Beautiful little animal but it just seriously surprised me.

Robert and Ari >^..^<

MWT said...

Yeah, I didn't think it was real either when it was right in front of me. :) It was cool to discover that not all spiders are the dull brown creepy crawly kind found in house corners - which I knew intellectually, but had never experienced first-hand.

Apparently people have tried to make a silk industry out of their web, but it didn't turn out to be workable. The web of this particular species is yellow, but there might be a related species somewhere that does blue. ;)