Along with spring flowers, spring birds, and spring frogs come spring spiders. Like frogs, spiders are one of those creatures that I love and miss during our short winters (I know, a lot of people think I’m nuts!). About a week ago, I came home and spotted my first spiders of the year. They were a pair of Mabel orchard orb weavers. They are a fairly common spider on the east coast of the United States, and one that I usually have in abundance around here. Interestingly, our Florida orchard orb weavers are now considered a separate species from the rest of the ones on the east coast since scientists have discovered some genetic differences.

The pair of spiders that I discovered last week are a breeding pair. There are a few ways to tell the male from the female. Probably the easiest way to tell right now is that the male has longer legs, especially in the front. As they mature, the female will also become larger than the male, and eventually, after they mate, she will kill and eat him (many spiders actually do this!). Another way to tell the two apart is that if you can look closely (through the macro lens, in other words!), the male has large palps coming out of his mouth. The females also have palps, but theirs are much smaller and difficult to see.

The female Mabel orchard orb weavers tend to have a thicker abdomen than the males do. That was pretty easy for me to see in my pair, although it does also tend to depend on the positions that the spiders are in. I have to say that I watched this pair for close to an hour, and at no point were they ever in the same position! Finally, if you look at the orange spots that these spiders have on the bottoms of their abdomens, the females tend to have two distinct triangles, whereas the males tend to have less distinct triangles or sometimes one single merged spot. Honestly, I couldn’t really tell much difference in the spots on the pair I observed.

I had hoped to watch this pair of orb weavers as they grew up. I wanted to watch what kinds of prey they caught in the web, how quickly they grew and how quickly to female out grew the male. Unfortunately, we had quite the afternoon storm yesterday, and the web and spiders are gone. I’m hoping that they survived, and will rebuild, but I will never know. I guess next time I want to spend some time watching one pair of spiders grow, I need to find a pair in a more sheltered environment!