Autumn – Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – and spiders! Sadly, by the time I got back from the Heath Hands Spider walk this web in my garden had already been abandoned but it looks as though it might have had good use. And for those you who, if you are like me, always feel guilty about walking into a spider’s web and destroying it – clear your consciences. Spiders rebuild their webs every 24 hours anyhow, sucking back all that silk and re-spinning it. So you will only have destroyed a day’s work, not a week’s.
And, to add to your store of knowledge – 25% of all spider species to be found in the UK are to be found on Hampstead Heath.
How do I know that? Because on Saturday I went on a Heath Hands Spider walk led by the lovely Rory – and here he is demonstrating how spiders have eight eyes, placed all round their heads giving them 360 vision.
In fact, despite all those eyes, most spiders have pretty poor vision – really only being able to see dark and light and the larger shapes that might be moving towards them. The exceptions being some of the hunting spiders – the ones that don’t use webs to catch their prey – such as the Wolf spider whose two front facing eyes have binocular vision.
Unlike the spiders who are currently crawling up the plughole into your bath, most of the spiders that we saw on the heath were fairly tiny. This, for example, is the Nursery Web spider.
The Nursery Web, as her name suggests, spins a web not just to catch her prey but to protect her eggs. After she lays them she wraps them up in a silk egg sack like a cotton wool ball. Then she looks for a nice tall plant like a thistle, suspends the bag at the top and builds a web round it to protect it – and that is where the spiderlings hatch. Like lots of the spiders we found, the Nursey web lived in the dying wild flowers and long grasses at the edge of the heath.
Money spiders are even smaller and they build tiny hammock like webs. When they decide the want to move on they spin out a long line of silk which catches the breeze and floats free. When the breeze is strong enough to lift them, they will detach themselves from whereever they are and float on the end of the silk until it catches on another plant that they fancy. At which point they catch on and spin a new web. When a spider gets caught in your hair it could well be a money spider flying on her line of silk looking for a new home. And those gossamer strands that early morning heath walkers may see stretched across the grass will also be money spider silk lines. This habit is called ballooning as they look like tiny upside down balloons attached to their strings.
Other web building spiders will spin out a thread and allow it to be carried by the breeze until it catches a plant or a branch. If that is a suitable attachment point they will pull the thread taught and then create a new web around it. And, as you will know if you have walked into a web, spider silk is both extremely elastic – but also stronger than steel.
And in case you have walked into a web and are worried that its spider might bite – no UK spider can bite and they are not venomous so there is no need to be scared of them.
Even tinier still than the money spider was the Candy Striped spider that we met on these oak leaves – she is the little white blob in the middle sitting on her egg sack.
Although this lady was white they often have bright pink stripes – hence candy striped. Although she is so tiny if an unsuspecting insect twice her size lands nearby she can wrap it extremely quickly in sticky silk thus immobilising it – to provide her with a leisurely lunch.
Wolf spiders (ours are smaller than the European wolves) are hunters – they are the ones with binocular front eyes to allow them to search out prey – and they are often to be found basking in the sun.
Other heath-living webless spiders are the Buzzing spider who lives in trees and buzzes to attract a mate and the Running crab spider who, true to his name, is short and squat, runs sideways and has long front legs to catch his prey.
The Orb Weaver (a small version of our larger garden spiders) is also round and dumpy and lives in the middle of his web. His short legs are especially adapted for hanging in webs which means he runs very awkwardly!
And then finally we caught a Harvestman. Despite his looks and his amazing legs, the Harvestman is not a spider although he is an arachnid – just a different kind of arachnid from spiders. Those legs are quite delicate and can easily get broken or torn of. While they are young and still growing – basically until they shed their last ‘body’ – they can regrow their legs but once mature, that’s it. However Rory says that he has seen them get by with far fewer than eight legs – indeed, one he met hobbling along pretty much OK on only three.
So thank you Rory and Heath Hands – a lovely way to spend a couple of hours – and great that we had no less than five young kids with us all taking a very active interest in our findings.
Scything the wild flowers on the Boating Pond island