The spined orb weaver of summer woods
Late July in Rhode Island, and a walk in the woods produced one of the season’s classic sights: this little orb weaver, a female with an abdomen ringed by a crown of sharp spines. She was about the size of my thumbnail, which is exactly the right size for a spined micrathena. The common name Spined Micrathena describes her exactly.
This is Micrathena gracilis, an orb weaver of the family Araneidae, order Araneae. The species name gracilis means slender, a compliment to the tidy build. The females are the famous ones, their small hard abdomens patterned in cream, black and yellow and armed with a ring of spines. The males are a different story: a few millimetres long, plain-bodied and spine-free, so different that they barely look like the same species. The spines, for all their armoured look, are lightweight, and the whole spider weighs almost nothing.
She builds a compact orb web between branches and waits for small flying insects, and the spines on her abdomen are thought to make her a difficult mouthful for birds. Many orb weavers rebuild their web every day or two, eating the old silk to recycle the protein. The web is small and tight, with the spider at the centre, and you rarely see it until you have already walked into it, which makes these webs among the most common things to stumble through during an eastern summer.
I photographed her without touching a single strand, which is more than the average hiker can claim, and left her to her evening shift.
