![]() She has probably already done the reproductive deed, although it’s more protocol than deed. It’s mid-October, so I imagine she will get to the egg-sac task soon, so she can deposit the hundreds of eggs growing inside that puffed up carapace. My giant garage spider is my own Charlotte, in a messy spiral web that is the sum total of her universe for the rest of her life. ![]() She will lay an egg sac before winter comes, and the egg sac will overwinter (she will die).” “I love to watch them on my porch when I have them. “It is a beautiful, harmless spider,” she wrote. Laurie sent me back a cheerful email, saying that people tend to notice cat-faced spiders in the fall when they start to get so big. Orb weavers won’t dash across your foot or wander into the house accidently because they’re clumsy crawlers, and don’t voluntarily leave their webs. gemmoides is one of 161 North American species in the family of orb-weaving spiders, Araneidae. ![]() Apparently those nippled points looked like cat ears to whoever gave Araneus gemmoides its common name, “cat-faced spider.” A. Location, location, location.Įven though I was mortified by the window, I sent a picture of the swollen spider to Laurie Kerzicnik, an insect specialist at Montana State University. The window she has commandeered is fly-spotted, filthy, and strewn with dead insects. I first noticed her before her abdomen ballooned, just a very large, lanky spider in what looked like leopard tights, stretched out in a plank position on the web. Her grossly bulbous abdomen is about the size of a cocktail onion, and looks like a cross between a puffball mushroom and the carapace of a Dungeness crab, with two nippled points. She’s usually lurking near the center of an enormous web that covers the entire window: the biggest, fattest spider I’ve ever seen. I wander out to my garage at odd hours to stare at her, fascinated and giddily horrified.
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