THE NATURAL SOUTH: Spiders and the 2017 Eclipse

"Wildlife Wednesday"

Spiders and the 2017 Eclipse

Last week I encouraged you all to check out the Inaturalist app and become a naturalist for a day to help participate in the California Academy of Sciences Life Responds project. The idea was to pick some form of wildlife and document it's response to the eclipse. I am afraid that many people fell for the hype that the eclipse would be a cataclysmic event that would rain down night on the earth. I heard far too many say that it was a huge let down. I was not let down! The rareness of the event and the simple fact that I was able to experience it with my father and my son was great for me. As for the wildlife, well maybe I was a bit let down. My prediction was that few if any of the wild animals or plants in our area (96% coverage) would respond to only a couple of brief minutes of the sun being blocked out by the moon. My thoughts were that it would be much like a cloudy day to the wildlife. I hypothesized that spiders would be a good fit to document and might be the most likely to respond since they often set up and maintain webs just before dark to take advantage of the increased bug activity at twilight. .

I decided that with no shortage of spiders and spider webs around the Farm that I would set and observe our local Yellow garden spider, Charlotte and her web.

Scientific Name: Argiope aurantia

Common Name: Yellow garden spider, Writing spider, golden garden spider, or corn spider

I decided to go all out and set up HD video and try to document all of the movements of the spider before, during, and after the eclipse.

Now I wish I could report some awesome findings, and show cool footage, but as with much of science, the routine is not always exciting. My well intentioned video would really not be much different than staring at the pictures. The spider was happy and content with a nice large grass hopper in the web and had almost no movement until 6:00p.m.