We love spiders for the role they play controlling insect populations and balancing nature. We love spiders because they eat insects we do not like. We love spiders despite their eating insects we love. Spiders are arachnids, not insects.
Many people find it difficult to love spiders. In our early cottaging years, the large dock spiders tested our resolve, but we have come to love them, to the point that we capture them gently when they show up inside the cottage or screened-in porch so we can give them their freedom outside on the lakeside deck rail. Shoo spider, shoo. Sometimes called fishing spiders, these beautiful large arachnids often wander far from the lakeshore in their relentless pursuit of food. They do seem to love the inside of our outhouse. Unfortunately, they share our love for damselflies as you can see in the photo below.
Every summer, as early as mid-June, we take great joy in seeing our first goldenrod crab spiders. Perhaps the showiest of our cottage spiders, goldenrod crab spiders reside on a variety of roadside flowers, but we see them most often on ox-eye daisies and common yarrow, and later, once they start to bloom, on their namesake goldenrod. This beautiful spider can adjust its colouring to match the colour of a flower. This effective form of camouflage may have contributed to its capture of this parasitic fly.
One spider that clearly punches above its weight is the furrow orbweaver, photographed below on our lakeside deck railing in May. We have never seen one indoors. They sit in the center of their webs around the outside of the cottage, waiting for a careless insect to brush by and become ensnared, as happened to this medium-sized dragonfly. The furrow orbweaver is common throughout most of North America.
Another common spider we see every year around the cottage is the grass spider, usually not until late June, but then until September. Grass spiders build their nests throughout the night on the wide stretch of grass (mowed green stuff) between the cottage and the lakeshore, but they also seem to like the inside of our porch. They are free to do so, since they help with ants, until the day we expect (important) visitors. At that point we trap them, relocate them to the deck, and sweep away the sheets of spider webs they have created inside our screened-in porch. The webs usually reappear within a few days.
Perhaps our favourite spiders are the jumping spiders. We love all jumping spiders. They are so cute with their tiny size, large eyes, and penchant for hopping across the table. Jumping spiders are classified as ‘active hunters’. They do not build webs. They keep a lookout for prey which, once spotted, they actively stalk before leaping. Various species live in our porch but not this marbled purple jumping spider which our intrepid photographer captured (on film) outside, hauling a grasshopper away, to where we do not know. (The spider was hauling the grasshopper, not the intrepid photographer.)
Some of our friends and visitors to the cottage are creeped out by spiders. We hope you are not one of those people or can learn to get past your aversion and the instinctive reaction to kill them on sight. Our spiders work hard for us. They are not interested in bothering us. Let’s leave them alone and enjoy the product of their labours.
For this article we referred to Larry Weber’s Spiders of the North Woods, as well as Sarah Rose’s Princeton Field Guide Spiders of North America. You might enjoy the guide at A Guide to the Jumping Spiders (Salticids) of North America where there is a great deal of information about jumping spiders, as well as video of a marbled purple jumping spider listed by its scientific name Phidippus purpuratus. Enjoy!
