These spiders turned into a real adventure. Initially I thought that they were juvenile females. But they never developed into full grown females. Also they exhibited a very interesting high frequency lateral vibration of their body when I plucked one of the supporting elements of their web. I thought that this might be a defence mechanism. I thought it was lost as they matured, but this turned out to be incorrect. I observed this with Susan this fall - Her oscillation rate was quite slow (as you can see from the video) but nevertheless, was still available.

Links

• Natasha, our golden silk spider
• ABC-Science Spiders Spin Out
• Prentiss Findlay and a Post and Courier spider review
• Brenda Rindge of the Post and Courier describes Frank's Spiders
• Watching Scarleett's web (June Griggs, letter to the editor)
• Visit my Sister, Irina
• Watch Sasha, a garden orb weaver, weave by night
• Visit Masha, a jewel orb weaver
• Visit my daughters, Laura, Lumi and Anda
• Visit Susan and watch the video of her weaving
• Our web zoo of critters from our garden (mostly)
• about spiders and silk making
• Synthesizing dragline silk
• Visit the Arachnology Home Page

Hi - my name is Laura and I am a very quiet banana spider (Nephila clavipes). Frank found me one afternoon, soon after I was born and started weaving my web. My web is 3 dimensional, but the business part of my web is a planar structure of the finest golden silk. Even though I am quite young, I know how to build a web, how to repair it and how to catch dinner. Below is Frank's story.

(These photos were taken with a partially occluded flash to avoid washout. Nikon 5700, manual focus, Gimp unsharp mask for post processing.) It has been almost 2 years since I first found Natasha in our garden. Natasha was a fully matured golden silk spider (banana spider or technically Nephila clavipes) and she was quite large (about 10 cm if you include her legs). I never saw any males with her and wondered what would appear next (2003) year. Well, nothing appeared. Every day I walked past her home - looking inside the bush to see if there were any new children hiding. Every day I found nothing.

This spring, Gene sent me a photo of an egg sack which showed many many micro-spiders inside. Unfortunately, they disappeared. I was encouraged, though, and started looking everywhere in our garden to find a similar egg sack. Nothing!

This year, I have continued my search. Each day as I walk to work, I walk along our drive which is lined with small bushes. I look in, around, under - just about everywhere - for any signs of spider life. Yesterday I saw a small web - not well organized - more like a cob web. But I looked closely and saw some small flowers caught in the web. Then suddenly there was Laura, thin, beautiful and with unusual colors (see Florida Nature photo). She was only about 1 cm long and the diameter of her thorax must be no more than 2 mm. So I started to take some photos. Photographically, with a digital camera, the focus is a problem - as the auto focus wants to grab the edge of a leaf or some other object that shows a sharp change in contrast. I used the manual focus and had a small success. Here are the results.