Levitating ants & spiders

When I was a child and lived in Cold Spring, NY, I remember my mother did not like spiders. Then one day she witnessed something that changed her mind about them. The place we lived in was constantly infested with tiny reddish colored ants. No matter what she did they kept coming into the house by the thousands. My mom could not do dishes without some of those ants climbing up her legs and biting her. They even bit her while she sat on the couch and even when she was in her bed. She is allergic to them, and she was really miserable. She had the most horrible looking hives wherever they bit her.

One day she was taking a bath and she noticed there was a line of ants coming in under the door and crawling under the wall heater vent. All of a sudden she saw one ant and then another and another go straight up into the air under the vent as though they were levitating. When she got out of the tub she looked to see how those ants were levitating, and low and behold there were some spiders up under those vents gathering for themselves, a feast. The spider would send down a web string, catch an ant, and pull the ant up where they would inject venom into it and wrap it up for a future meal. My mom said there were hundreds of those mummy looking spider web wrapped ants under that vent. Those spiders were what she thought was the enemy, yet they were helping her to get rid of the enemy (the ants) that were literally making her sick.  She vowed then and there to never kill a spider again.

Since then we remove spiders from the house by capturing them in a glass and then they get put outside. Occasionally we play, blow a spider. If we find a spider hanging on a web, we grab the web, far above the spider, and as the spider (usually a small one) dangles, you try to blow it onto your intended target. In the wintertime, we put the spiders we catch down into the cellar. The spiders in the corners of the ceiling in the bathrooms get to stay as they do a good job of capturing the bugs that sometimes infest our indoor plants. Unfortunately, for many spiders that enter our home, our cats like to play with them until they are dead. If we find a spider being tortured, we try to save it. They sometimes lose a leg or two, but spiders can regrow lost limbs.

There are no dangerous native spiders in the northeast, however, the brown recluse and the black widow occasionally can be transported here by travelers, in luggage, in boxes, in vehicles, etc. The native spiders you see here are shy and harmless to humans. Most of them have fangs too small and weak to even puncture human skin. They will not even attempt to bite unless they are held, accidentally stepped on, or unfortunately under something you are lifting. Spiders are beneficial as they feed on harmful insects like flies, ants, crickets, and mites that are in and around your home. A list of spiders of New York is poor to say the least. The last official list was done in 1928 by Crosby and Bishop. That list recorded 576 species.

Spiders have eight legs (four pairs). They have two body parts consisting of a cephalothorax (a head fused with its thorax), and they have an abdomen. Most spiders have eight eyes. However, the not native but sometimes seen here brown recluse has six eyes. I read somewhere that suggested you could identify the poisonous brown recluse by those six eyes, I ask this, “Who is going to get that close to a possible dangerous spider to see how many eyes it has? Not me” All spiders have a jaw-like structure (chelicerae) that are hollow claw-like fangs through which venom can be injected. All spiders produce venom that is poisonous to their prey of insects. They must inject venom into their foods because spiders can only ingest liquids. The venom liquefies their caught meal.

When spiders catch their intended meal, they wrap it in their webbing, which is silk that is secreted as a liquid through their spinnerets. The silk is liquid, but it hardens when it makes contact with air. Amazingly spiders can produce different textures of silk. Some spiders’ silk is for building their webs and snares, and all spiders’ silk is used to construct a sac to deposit their eggs into. There is even silk used as draglines or for ballooning. Ballooning is done by spiderlings (young spiders) who climb to a high spot and release silk strands and wait for strong wind currents.  When the wind takes them, they release more silk and they sail away to the location of their new homes. On a clear day, these ballooning threads (gossamer) can fill the air.

Spiders may have several egg sacs. Each sac can contain several hundred eggs. One female spider can produce up to 3,000 eggs in several sacs over a period of time. Some of the eggs may hatch a few weeks later, or the eggs may hatch the next year in the spring. Spiders have to molt (shed their skin) in order to grow. Spiders may have to molt up to 12 times before it can reach maturity. You can sometimes find these shed off skins in old spider webs. Most spiders life span is one or two seasons.

Spiders, even though they scare a lot of people, are very beneficial to the world of nature - to us. Next week I will write about some of the specific spiders we have here in Akwesasne and explain their necessary and important roles in the web of nature.