I had a stowaway!

maniac57

maniac57

Old, Fat, and still faster than you
Found this tenacious little spider today AFTER a nice long ride to the store and back.


Gotta give respect to anything willing to go for a ride with ME at the controls!
After these pics were taken, we had a frog-strangler rainstorm and he has moved to the side of my RV.
I plan to feed him and see how fat I can get him.
I've done this with banana spiders before, and had one get the size of a friggin racquetball!
Hope he hangs around a while, fellow MB enthusiast and all.
 
I don't know what kind he was but some years ago I had a spider build a web under a back deck on my old house. He looked like a little land crab. I started feeding him. I'd catch insects, grasshoppers, miller moths, wasps, toss them into his web and watch as he'd come out, grab them and start wrapping them into some kind of cocoon.

This kept up all summer. When I first noticed him he was less than dime size but by the end of summer that little sucker was as big as a half dollar. Then 'he' gave birth, or laid eggs, or whatever spiders do to reproduce and one day there were hundreds of tiny spiders crawling all over the web. They all looked like little versions of mom, or dad or whoever, and then they were gone.

Funny thing was, the next spring there was another little spider building a web in exactly the same place............and the cycle continued.

Tom
 
Back when I lived in Massillon Ohio, I had a basement door that wouldn't latch right. One day, worried about intruders, I resolved to go down in the basement and see if I could fix it from the interior side. I moved stuff out of the way to get to the entry-way to the stairs and that's when I saw it: a great, huge web with a BIG fat orange spider on it. It had something like tiger stripes and it's body was bigger than my thumb. I'm not normally afraid of spiders, and I still got chills looking at this thing.
It *ahem* seemed a shame to ruin its web just to get to the basement door. (Yeah, that sounds good.) I decided to let it be the basement door guard. I figured it would take a stalwart fellow to push through that web and boldly move the spider aside. And somebody that determined would have broken down the door anyway.
And for anyone else coming in that way, their screams would wake me in time to deal with them.
 
There are only 2 spiders you need worry about, this is one of them.

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The other is a big brown fuzzy one (brown recluse) and it's even worse.

We have lots of black widows here, I see them every year right at home. I don't hurt them, they are my friends. I haven't seen any brown recluses, I figure I'll let the black widows eat them - :)
 
I hate them red backs, once found a nest of them under a car while I was squezzed under it on my back.
Up here we have a couple of bird eating spiders.
The Golden Orb Weaver grows at least as big as any mans hand. It has the worlds strongest web, which is said was spun by indigenous people to create a fishing line.
I once had one in front of the kitchen sink while We were camping in the shed as I was building the house.
It caught a bird.
A full grown Sun Bird, which is a very beautiful golden yellow and blue Humming Bird.
And yes it ate it,
 
I don't know if this is real or PhotoShop but maybe one of our young military guys who has seen some desert time will chime in. A Camel Spider? Yuk! Supposedly they were known to crawl into sleeping bags. Never saw anything like it in Vietnam.

Tom
 

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