Mating till exhaustion

     It's inevitable. Step out your door on many fall mornings and find yourself in the sticky tangle of a spider web. If you find wiping a web off your body disconcerting, just think what the hard-working spider goes through to see their masterpiece destroyed. I've always been a bit squeamish about spiders, and still am, when they're inside my house. But checking out their  webs- outdoors - especially in the fall when hundreds of bugs might be in a single one, I've come to appreciate the environmental benefits of spiders.

   Molly Rossiter, the Gazette's faith & values reporter, passed along this photo of a spider commonly noticed in the fall. I knew a little about it, but Donald Lewis, entomologist for Iowa State University Extension, helped enlighten me even more.

   Here's what he had to say:

 The spider is called the yellow garden spider.  See http://bugguide.net/node/view/2025

All spiders are ecologically beneficial. They generally do not reduce pest populations sufficiently early in the season to make a difference to crop yield, but they are capturing and eating insects. Garden spiders primarily catch large, flying insects that are active in the daytime.   

 The zig-zag line is called the stabilimentum and as you can read on Wikipedia, there is great debate about the function. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_decoration#Function

 We see more spiders in the fall because spiders start over every spring and it takes till fall for them to grow to adult size (and noticeable). All spiders are venomous but only two in the upper Midwest can be considered dangerous. Orb weavers such as the garden spiders are not dangerous.

 Belief that females eat the male after mating (commonly believed about all spiders and praying mantids) is not as common as believed. Mating till exhaustion (that the males mate with many females and die of exhaustion) is a great tale, but a tall one none-the-less.