Beautiful Orb Weaver Spider in Holmdel, NJ
During a servicing of a residential customer in Holmdel, NJ, I came across a beautiful orb weaver spider on the home’s exterior. Spiders, like bats, are misunderstood and their negative reputation is undeserved. Mostly, many erroneously believe that many spiders are poisonous and their bites can be deadly. In fact, very few spiders bite people, and of those that do, only two of them in New Jersey, black widows and the brown recluse, have venom that is toxic to people. Spiders are actually beneficial insects. They help people by reducing pest populations in and around homes and gardens. Spiders feed on all sorts of insects, mites, and even other spiders. They feed by first immobilizing their prey and then regurgitating or injecting their digestive fluids into the prey in order to liquifying them. Finally, once the prey is dissolved, they suck in the digested food. Considering how they kill insects, they make pest control technicians look like Mr. Nice Guy!
All spiders produce silk throughout their lifetime. They use silk to build webs to capture prey and make egg cases and shelters. Web-building spiders build their webs in undisturbed places to capture their food. Unlike hunting spiders that actively chase and capture their prey, web-building spiders live near their web and wait for their meals to come to them after they are caught in their sticky web.
One of the more common web-building spiders is the orb weaver spider that makes the familiar “typical” spider web of concentric circles and radiating lines. Orb spiders have swollen-looking abdomens and are found in a variety of colors. Despite their large size and sometimes “scary” coloration, these spiders are not at all dangerous. Perhaps the biggest celebrity orb weaver is the barn spider Charlotte from the classic children’s novel Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White (the same author of Stuart Little) that’s been made into a few movies, a stage musical, and even a video game. The story is that clever Charlotte befriends a pig named Wilbur and saves him from slaughter by writing weaves of praise into her web. To this day, I look at spider webs to see if there are any secret encoded messages written for me!
If you have an opportunity to watch these spiders spin their web, it’s an amazing display of nature to observe. You’ll find spiders wherever there is a large supply of insects as a food source. If you have large, persistent spider populations in your home, it is a sure sign that you have an insect problem to go with it. You control spider populations indoors by controlling insect populations. I will inspect spider webs and use them as monitoring glue boards to tell me what insects are crawling about in a home. To reduce spider populations indoors, reduce clutter to minimize harborage areas, remove webbing with a broom or vacuum, and, most important, keep down insect populations. If individual spiders have accidentally wandered into your home, try to capture it in a cup and set it free outside. These guys, even if you don’t find them very attractive, are truly our friends — they are an important part of the ecosystem and significantly reduce insect populations around our homes.