At least one Galveston home was partially destroyed by high winds early Thursday morning. The banana spider who lives beside my back porch had most of her web torn asunder by wind and rain.
Early Thursday, she was hard at work rebuilding.
I'm wondering if other people in the county are having as much fun as my wife and me watching these big but harmless spiders do their thing. She is over two inches long, yellow, orange and brown, and she's hairy and scary. On the other hand, as I learned, she's dangerous only if you're a flying insect.
We first noticed the one outside our kitchen about three weeks ago. Her web was then quite large and growing. It spread from the the corner of our back porch, up the wall and across to a tree by our back fence. I'm guessing the total webbed space at something like 60 to 80 square feet.
Teri and I saw the web and its industrious mistress as wonders of nature in an urban setting.
Our theory was that the spider wasn't hurting anything, and her web might help reduce the mosquitoes and other flying insects around our back porch light. So we let her move in and construct her edifice. She's been a silent, hard-working neighbor ever since, wrapping her prey in silk, saving for a rainy day, which has now arrived.
I went to the web (World Wide, not spider's) and got the following information about the banana spiders, also known as golden silk spiders, from a web site written by scientists at the University of Florida:
"In Florida and other southeastern states, the golden silk spider, Nephila clavipes (Linnaeus), a large orange and brown spider with the feathery tufts on its legs, is well known ... It is particularly despised by hikers and hunters, as during late summer and fall the large golden webs of this species make a sticky rap for the unwary. However, as is typical with most spiders, there is little real danger from an encounter with the golden silk spider. The spider will bite only if held or pinched, and the bite itself will produce only localized pain with a slight redness, which quickly goes away. On the whole, the bite is much less severe than a bee string.
"Typically, the webs are made in open woods or edges of dense forest, usually attached to trees and low shrubs, although they may be in the tops of trees or between the wires of utility lines (Krakauer 1972). Prey consists of a wide variety of small to medium-sized flying insects, including flies, bees, wasps, and small moths and butterflies (Robinson and Mirick 1971). We have also seen them feeding on small beetles and dragonflies."
This must be the season. I spotted two more of the big female spiders (the males are smaller and less colorful) while looking for a lost ball recently at Timber Creek Golf Course. They had a huge web strung up over a wooden cart path bridge. (No, I never found the ball.)
What about it, readers: How common are these colorful, scary-looking creatures in Galveston County?
