What the Bolas Spider Does

Now you see a spider...

and now a bit of poop.

 A young female or a male bolas spider hunts by hiding on the underside of leaves, then ambushing insects that walk by. Youngsters and males don't have the huge abdomen, and presumably lack the physical resources to produce a bolas. But a mature female bolas spins a strand of sturdy silk, and from that she suspends a supersticky glob of silk and goo. And she hangs upside down with this lasso dangling, waiting for a moth.

Having read that, I thought, Well, does she station herself beneath a lamp or next to a flower, hoping a moth runs into her bolas? I had to dig a bit to get the real story. 

This spider situates itself in a mothy spot, then emits a perfect copy of the sex pheromone of three species of noctuid moth (the bristly cutworm, bronzed cutworm and smoky tetanolita). Whoa. And when the male cutworm moth comes spiraling in to the perfume, wham! She swings her bolas like an Argentine gaucho, snares it, hauls it in hand over hand, and has a nice meal. 

 As if it weren't cool enough to look exactly like a fresh shiny bird's fecal sac

 and suspend yourself from safety lines and drop yourself down a few feet whenever you need to

and have the cutest little cornicled head and a bunch of adorable jewellike eyes, and sit there with your legs wrapped around your face like a shy Charlotte

and charm the bejabbers out of an eleven-year-old boy and his swooning mama. 

This little beauty, I hope, has laid a bunch of egg sacs in a protected place, and will leave us some beautiful spiderlings come spring. I'd never seen a bolas spider before, but I hope to see many more.

Just another example of the insanely cool stuff going on in backyards everywhere. Sometimes it takes a little fella like Liam to sniff them out. 

When he isn't bombing his sister's profile photos, that is.

Rondeau Ric, KatDoc and FloridaCracker, this Liam's for you!

Beautiful Bolas Spider

This must be the autumn when we find all the cool bugs. Arachnids. Organisms.  Maybe it’s because there are four of us looking all the time. Liam came into the studio to get me. He said, “There’s this cross between bird poop and a spider. And it’s on your headband on the kitchen table. When I blow on it it moves. So I know it’s a spider. But it looks just like bird poop.”

So I quit what I was doing and hurried into the kitchen to find the organism precisely as billed: a cross between bird poop and a spider.

It had affixed itself to the elastic sweatband with a little pad of cross-hatched silk and seemed happy to hunker there, its legs wrapped around its face, pretending to be poop.

I was immediately captivated. Its abdomen was so shiny, so round, so fully packed! A quick search of my books and the Net revealed that Liam had gifted me with Mastophora hutchinsoni, one of five Mastophora species in the U.S. Their common name is bolas spider. This was a newly mature female, ready to produce her egg sacs.

Having raised so many orphaned baby birds, I have to say that this spider looks exactly like a fresh fecal sac (those membranous avian “diapers” that enclose the droppings of baby birds still in the nest, which enable the parent birds to remove the droppings and keep the nest clean). It's got the white urates and the brown swirl of feces and, without going on too long about how much it looks like poop and how incredibly beautiful that is, it is perfect in every detail.

This is obviously a potent anti-predator strategy. Nobody wants to eat poop. So this spider can go about her bidness without worrying too much about getting picked off.

Observing her for quite awhile, it became apparent to me that this is a spider who is highly concerned for her safety. With such a big heavy abdomen, she would need to be careful about falling like a stone on a hard surface. Everywhere she crept, and she didn't creep far, she laid down silk, guywires and safety lassos to catch her should she lose her footing. And when she eventually did, there she hung, safe, with my palm as backup. She was cool and heavy as a quarter.

 You'd think a spider with such an impressive abdomen (aka silk factory) might spin a fabulous orb web. And she is related to the orbweavers. But no. What this spider does is ever so much cooler than that. It is a trickster, a faker, a skilled cowgirl among spiders. And I will tell you more Tuesday. For now, please just be content to admire her poopoid beauty.