I often get asked to identify leafy things and with a varying degree of success but last week I was asked to identify something quite different and got lucky with an ‘educated guess’.
Betty Phillips from Brecon asked me to pop in and see if I could tell her what type of spider she had in her conservatory – full marks to her for a start for realising it was a spider with a difference. I know I have spiders here at the cottage, due to the large amount of ‘spider homes’ (or cobwebs!) that are apparent but I don’t take any notice of the inhabitants.
And I am definitely not a spider expert either – to me there are only two types, small ones and scary ones. Betty’s spider was small and quite exotic looking and I mentioned that it looked like a bit like a wasp, with it’s yellow stripes. Guess what – it turned out to be – a wasp spider!
I rang the lovely Dr Rhys Jones of BBC’s Wildlife Patrol and asked his advice. As helpful as always, he told me that the wasp spiders are quite common in the south of England but not the south of Wales. Their appearance is actually a defence mechanism, as by disguising themselves as wasps, predators leave well alone believing them to be a wasp and not a spider.
He thought the one in Betty’s conservatory was probably a female and had come indoors looking to over winter somewhere warmer than their natural grassland habitat, where they feed on grasshoppers.
Apparently females rule the roost or web and when it comes to mating, males play a daring and dangerous game. They will wait at the edge of a web until the female has moulted into a mature form then will dive in to make their move. Females actually eat males whilst they are mating, so doing it at this precise moment is key to the hopeful survival of males as the female’s jaws are still soft. However, the males are usually eaten – with soft jaws or not!
He also said, like all spiders they are venomous, but not aggressive, and their venom is not dangerous and then rather optimistically added that if you touch them they have very prickly bodies!
I’ll be taking his word for that.
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