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The Legacy of a Spider: Aurantia Argiope Still settling in at Gradyville, KY, Vermonter Sharon Whitehurst shares her diary of life-cycle of an Adair County favorite and a Gradyville icon, the Garden Spider, or Aurantia Argiope. The spider is revered in these parts, one many already call the Adair County National Spider. (Though there are factions of Wolf Spider and Four-eyed Jumping Spider advocates.). This is the story of living and dying, of sisterhood, of adaptive reuse, and the continuity of life Click on headline for story plus photo album, CM Spider links By Sharon Whitehurst On August 15, 2010, enjoying the early morning sun on our east-facing porch, my eye was caught by the web of a large spider. The anchoring lines of the web were attached to a pillar of the porch while the orb itself was suspended in a clump of overgrown sedum and liriope. The black and yellow pattern of the spider as well as the distinctive zig-zag in the center of her web were familiar to me from our years in New England, where these spiders are a presence in late summer and early autumn. Research on the internet provided the name of the spider, argiope aurantia. Within days I discovered that a sister spider has spun a second web deep in the clump of sedum.For the next two months I watched and photographed the activities of the busy spider in the web nearest the porch.The second spider did little other than sustain herself on the insects that blundered into her web. The spider nearest the porch produced 4 egg sacs over the two month period, attaching them in a tidy vertical row on the porch column. Each time that she finished egg production her body appeared shrunken and she rested for a day protectively near the sacs. On the following days she refurbished her web. On several mornings I was on the porch while she did this housekeeping and watched, fascinated, as she daubed dots of silk and then stitched in the intricacies of the web. Spider # 2, deep in the clump of sedum, produced only 2 egg sacs. On the morning of October 12, Spider # 1 was dead, the only evidence of her brief life a crumbled husk of black and yellow and the legacy of the four egg sacks. The day after her death spider # 2 moved into her sister's web, first contructing a bridge between the two. She moved back into the clump of sedum to produce her final egg sac on October 26. 2010. The cold weather brought the end of her life cycle. More about argiope aurantia can be found by clicking to Argiope aurantia at Wikipedia. -sharon WhitehurstRelated links:
This story was posted on 2011-02-07 03:31:45
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