11 November 03

Gossamer Afternoon

We both had the day off today, so after running an errand in town, and an excursion over to Sacramento to the Crocker Art Museum, we returned home for lunch and then sat outside on a very pleasant warm afternoon where we heard pipits in the field and a red-shouldered hawk calling from the trees by Putah Creek. And floating across the field we’d see occasional strands of gossamer. The spiders are dispersing.

I don’t know anything about what spiders make gossamer strands and googling wasn’t a whole lot of help, though this page from the nearby Stebbins Cold Canyon Natural Reserve suggests that these were orb-weaving spiders, of the family Araneidae. Time for a trip to the library for some arachnid research. At any rate, as Fred reminded us last year, it’s a pleasure to be conversant with the gossamer ways of spiders.

Posted by at 07:05 PM in Nature and Place | Link |
  1. Most orb weaving spders, and a few others, make gossamer strands when they hatch from the egg sacs. They fly for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles on the air currents. Meteorologists, when sending up weather balloons into the upper atmosphere, have found frozen bodies of spiderlings that revived when warmed up. Some scientists surmise that spiders may actually be able to survive for thousands of years this way and that individual spiderlings thus found may actually be several thousand years old.

    For me, these “parachutists” remind me of one of my favorite childhood books, “Charlotte’s Web”. Whenever I see spiderlings drifting by, a certain sadness always remains, when I remember Charlotte’s death. But aren’t they beautiful?

    — butuki    12. November 2003, 05:08    Link

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