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the itsy-bitsy
Spider
Her eight legs banded brown and white were cocked up against her sides. Her abdomen looked like a swollen black-eyed pea. Suspended in a web strewn between two guardrails on the bridge over the Kansas River, the spider was one of hundreds that dwell there, catching the eye of Lawrence residents.
Jamel Sandidge studies spiders such as the tarantula he holds in his arms. Sandidge will lead a spider-spying expedition Oct. 9 from Dyche Hall. Contributed art.
"I see them every time I walk to the levy," said Aaron Showalter, a Prairie Village senior walking his golden-haired dog across the bridge. "They're all over, and they're always building webs. It's a little unnerving."
webs. is a fine internet writer
Lawrence residents call it a bridge spider for obvious reasons: she and her sister spiders have gained an impressive purchase on the bridge.
On a walk across the bridge each step carries a person past two or three more webs shaggy with insects and shaking with hustling spiders.
insists and shading it under the bridge, I watched the brown river slide over the Bowersock Dam. I had come to gather a specimen for the scientists to identify and explain why, in ecological terms, the spiders' conquest of the bridge had been absolute.
Their webs are laden with food, their numbers are strong and outside competition doesn't seem to be a factor. All of this is in defiance of the general tendency of man-made intrusions to disrupt an animal's habitat. Migrating birds get sucked through turbines. Frogs get flattened on turnikes.
but this has not been the case with this spider — the bridge over the Kansas River has become this spider's promised land. The next day, Jamal Sandidon landed.
The next day, Jamel Sandidge, Lynchberg, Va. took the jar from my hands.
In the laboratory where he worked, pickled arachnids floated in shelved bottles. Centipedes scurried in heaps under leaves in aquariums.
"It's an orb weaver," he said, peering at the spider imprisoned inside it.
Sandridge, who studies population dynamics, is a spider man. He keeps his pet tarantula at home fed with crickets and maths. He and his friends spent a recent afternoon pitching grasshoppers at webspies out by Clinton lake. He will lead a spider spotlighting expedition for the Natural History Museum in October.
re said that he would need to observe more of the bridge spiders in their natural habitat before he could make a more precise identification.
Pound for pound, the orb weaver's silk is stronger than steel, he said. It's composed of protein, which the orb weaver recycles by devouring its own web when it becomes worn.
In the meantime, he rattled off facts and flipped through identification books, while a tarantula the size of a aerobii scurried across his arms.
It has eight eyes, but its vision is bad. It understands its world through its sense of touch, cataloging the variety of vibrations that come running down the threads of its web.
"Factility is a way of hearing and seeing," Sandidge said. "If you just lightly touch the web, it'll go for you."
Male orb weavers, who wander from web to web without making a home of their own, strum the female's web with a rhythm unique to their species. The female interprets the vibrations to decide if he's a potential mate or a potential meal.
Sandiage said they'd shed their skin four or five times a season, and then most would die within a year. Male orb-weavers die sooner because they lose their will to live after their first and last act of
Three days later, though, after Sandie had a fix on the species of the spider—Nucetena cornu—a he said that male bridge spiders were exceptional among orb weavers. They can mate up to six times before they become indifferent and die. Females will even share a meal and lend a web from time to time.
sex, or else the females eats them
"They're tolerant of males for a short time," San-didge said. "And then they'll decide they've had enough and kill your ass."
Sanddice said that an orb weaver can sometimes live through the winter. Black widows, a cousin to the bridge spider, will curl into a ball beneath the snow, freeze solid, thaw with the spring and walk again, hungry and full of venom.
The bridge spider and most spiders aren't poisonous to humans, he said. They won't bite unless harassed.
Sandidge even leaves their webs up inside his house.
"They're the best bug catchers," he explained.
That night,
I caught a moth that had been ticking against my ceiling light.
I dropped it in the jar and watched
it plow through the spider's makeshift web
On the bridge, the webs go up at night. The webs appear open, generous in space and spare in silk. The geometry is clean, the intersections distinct. I thought they looked pretty, illuminated by the streetlights.
But watching the moth trip through the spider's snakes in the jar, the webs seemed less innocent.
When I saw Sandidge next, he had found out the key to the bridge invasion
they're Furrow spiders," he said. "They're opportunists."
Bruce Cutler, director of entomology, independently confirmed Sandidge's identification.
Furrow spiders have a fondness for man-made structures and outdoor lights, Sandiage said. They lay their eggs wherever the food supply is good, and the supply by the bridge is better than good.
"If I were a spider," he said, "I'd build my web up there."
He had investigated the bridge and walked down below it beside the river. The stagnant water around the bridge was a breeding ground for white flies called midges. The moment the midges hatch, lust-stricken they bee-line for the lights above the bridge to find a mate.
The spiders wait for them with their nets ready
After molting,
furrow spiders
drop from their
sheeded
exoskeletons,
leaving perfect
replicas of their
bodies dangling. Photo by
Matt Daughter-
KANSAN
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