Dear Readers, many of you have been following the story of my Mum and Dad’s 60th Anniversary Party last Thursday. It went very well, and for some photos and a few more details, have a look at my second post today called ‘The Party’. On the other hand, if you come here for the wildlife, read on……

Dear Readers, I know that autumn has arrived when I can’t get to the shed without walking through a web, and when the children returning from school always stop to point at the many, many spiders who are making their homes in the lavender in my front garden. However, it is surprising to see how many different habitats these creatures can make use of, and how thoroughly at home they can make themselves with the slightest of encouragement.

Apologies in advance to any arachnophobic readers. You might want to move on at this point. No spiders next week, I promise.

if you want to create a wildlife reserve actually inside your house, I can recommend nothing more than a disinclination to dust and some old-fashioned sash windows. For, at the back of my house, guarding the kitchen and gobbling up all manner of small insects is a rather splendid False Widow Spider. I have no idea of the species, because this can only be determined by killing the spider and dissecting her genitalia, and I have no intention of doing any such thing. Instead, I am watching the spider (who I have named Beverley on the basis that this can be a male or female name, and his/her sex is yet another thing that I don’t know) as s/he goes about the business of repairing her web.

For most of the day, s/he keeps a low profile in the little hole that used to house a window lock.

But sometimes she ventures out to see what’s going on. Her web reminds me rather of Stratford Bus Station (or maybe that’s just me).

False Widows have been the subject of many overwrought headlines in the more distasteful parts of the British press, and I dread to think how many perfectly innocent spiders have been squished to ‘save our children’ from being bitten. Just persuade little Johnnie not to stick his finger into the spider’s house and all shall be well. Even the mention of ‘Widow’ can be enough to put some people into a flap, in spite of  the word ‘False’ at the start. But it’s probably just as well not to get me started, or we shall be here all day.

Apparently a female False Widow can live for up to five years, and as I’ve had a spider living here for a while, I’m guessing that she may turn into a long-term companion.

Anyhow, as far as I’m concerned s/he is not just a spider, but is guarding the back entrance of the house from from evildoers like a trusty bullmastiff. As her web is stronger, pound for pound, than steel, I feel that this is only a slight overstatement.

But who is guarding the front of the house? Meet Frances/Francis.

Fran has made a web the size of the entire windowpane, and seems to be growing bigger every day. I often wonder why there are no spiders about, and then suddenly hundreds of them, but it seems that it’s largely because, by the end of August, they’ve grown big enough for us to start paying attention.

I love the crucifix of white dots on the abdomen of these spiders, not to mention their little stripey legs. They seem, like caterpillars, to be creatures of childhood. My mother was terrified of spiders, but always managed to hide it from me, which meant that I found them delightful rather than horrifying. I always loved Charlotte, the canny spider of Charlotte’s Web, and would spend hours watching the spiders carefully spinning their webs.

Spiders seem to me to be something that we all have in common, for every nation that I know has some kind of spider that spins an orb web and has a whole mass of folklore about the creature, from the Ancient Egyptian goddess Neith (thought to be the precursor to the Babylonian Ishtar and the Greek Arachne) to Anansi in Western Africa, and the Lakota Iktomi. Spiders feature in Australian Aboriginal art, in the ancient mythology of Japan, and in both the Islamic and Judaic oral traditions. Who could not look at a spider and not marvel at her skill and her patience?

But out in the shed, it’s a whole other story. The place is full of cobwebs, and the corpses of unfortunate flying insects who met their end amongst the bird food and the power tools. And, somewhat surprisingly, these spiders are the most ferocious of all, not to humans but to other spiders.

This creature is also known as the Daddy Long-Legs Spider, but that way madness lies. For me, a Daddy Long-Legs is a cranefly. In North America, a Daddy Long-Legs is what I call a harvestman. So I’m going to stick with calling these creatures Pholcus. They look like some kind of lunar landing module, or possibly a virus. You can tell you’ve found a Pholcus if you disturb it and it vibrates up and down  like some kind of very, very angry small dog.

For all their sinister appearance, these spiders are totally harmless to humans. However, they seem to be adept at catching and eating other spiders, even those that are much larger than they are. My friends on the Spiders of Britain and Northern Europe Facebook group report that Pholcus reduce the biodiversity in their houses by killing and eating all the other spiders. Furthermore, they breed rapidly when happy, and can soon outnumber all the other species. Some members of the group devote themselves to catching every Pholcus they can find and putting it out into their sheds. I feel that I have fallen amongst friends. I thought I was the only person who would put off getting the window cleaner in until the winter because of the spiders, but it appears that there are numerous other folk who are just as eccentric as I am. Which is something of a relief.

So, there we have it. I’m sure this is only a tiny fraction of the spider species in and around my house – I haven’t seen an actual house spider this year, for example, and I’m sure that there are lots of others hiding in the undergrowth and lurking under stones. Personally, I find them fascinating, and I’m only sorry that the jumping spider who sometimes creeps across my front door like a Special Forces agent on surveillance didn’t  put in an appearance. And soon, all these eight-legged wonders will disappear as autumn edges into winter, and all the adult spiders either die (many providing a meal for their offspring), or go into a state of torpor to wait out the cold. They represent a brief explosion of life, the last bloom before the stillness falls.

Dear Readers, I have always loved caterpillars. When I was a youngster, living in a tiny house in Stratford, the garden was full of the woolly bear larvae of tiger moths and yellow and black-striped cinnabar moth caterpillars. Once, I even found a spitting puss moth caterpillar. But they seem rarer these days, or maybe I just don’t pay as much attention as I used to. Anyway, this wonderful chap had been found in my friend A’s garden, and she had brought ‘him’ round for me to try to identify.

As it turns out, this is the caterpillar of the Knotgrass moth, a member of the Noctuid family of small, greyish-brown moths that make up 70% of all my finds if I put out a moth trap. The caterpillars are spectacular creatures, usually hairy, often brightly coloured. It seems almost a shame from a human point of view that they end up being so inconspicuous, but of course this works well for the moth. The hairs on the caterpillars are an irritant for predators (and also sensitive humans) but the moth has no defence except camouflage.

Caterpillars are curious creatures. The name literally means ‘hairy cat’ (from the Old French caterpelose’) although not all caterpillars are hairy. As any one who has ever looked after a caterpillar will tell you, they live to eat, and are perfectly adapted for the job. They have three pairs of ‘thoracic legs’ at the front, which they use for grasping the leaves that they eat: these are the ‘true legs’.Then there are a further five pairs of sucker-like legs, called prolegs,  for hanging on to things – if you hold a caterpillar you will notice how hard they are to remove from your skin.

Although the head looks as if it has two enormous eyes, these are actually what’s known as the head capsule. The true eyes are tiny spots underneath. A caterpillar also has two tiny antennae underneath the eyes, and two very fine jaws for munching.

Caterpillars need to breathe, but they have no lungs – spiracles, tiny openings along the side of the animal, enable oxygen to reach the tissues of the animal directly, without the need for a complicated blood system. Caterpillars have no veins or arteries, but their organs, such as they are, are bathed in green ‘blood’ called hemolymph – the fluid itself is clear, but may be pigmented green by the caterpillar’s food.

You can see the spiracles of ‘our’ caterpillar in the photo below: the spiracles are the tiny white spots. Behind each one are a series of branching tunnels called tracheoles, which deliver the oxygen into the hemolymph and hence to the rest of the body, including the 4000 muscles (compared to a human’s 629) and the digestive organs.

This simple body system means that there are first aid measures that work well on insects in general, and caterpillars in particular. If a caterpillar tumbles into a water butt, for example, rolling it in kitchen paper to pull the water out of the spiracles can often effect a near miraculous recovery. Similarly, if a caterpillar is slightly punctured due to some unfortunate accident, a tiny piece of sticking plaster may preserve it until its next change of skin.When I was a child I planned to write a book called ‘The Caterpillar Hospital’, but feared that it might not have many takers. Instead, at age 8, I wrote a masterpiece called ‘Riding and Stable Management’ even though I’d never actually touched a horse, let alone ridden them. I followed this up with the magisterial ‘Snakes of the World’, although I had never seen a snake. It’s nice, these days, to be writing about plants and animals that I actually have some acquaintance with.

The locomotion of caterpillars is, for me, part of their enduring charm. I love the way that they wave the front half of their bodies in larger and larger circles, reaching out with their little ‘arms’ in the hope of grasping something tasty. They have very poor sight (as we’ve seen, those ‘big eyes’ are fake) so they do everything by scent (using those tiny tiny antennae) and taste. They also have a good sense of touch, which is amplified by all those hairs (technically ‘setae’). When touched, many caterpillars will hunch up to make themselves appear bigger (like this one does) or roll up like a  Cumberland sausage and crash to the floor. After all, nearly every other creature, from the energetic blue tit to the near-invisible parasitic wasp, likes a tasty caterpillar.

Caterpillars don’t have a brain, as such – they have a line of nerves that resembles a vestigial spinal cord, but along their ventral surface. It’s safe to say that caterpillars need to be reactive when danger threatens, but they don’t need to mate, or indulge in social relationships, or bring up babies. They simply need to eat the right things, and as much of them as possible.

A butterfly, however, has a rudimentary brain, known as a cerebral ganglion, probably because its life has now gotten a lot more complicated – it needs to find a mate, maybe defend a territory, or even migrate for thousands of miles. However, recent research has shown that butterflies and moths remember what they learn as caterpillars. In the experiment, caterpillars were given a shock at the same time as being exposed to the smell of acetate, and as butterflies they would (very sensibly) avoid the smell.  I do wonder why, instead of being scared out of their wits, the caterpillars couldn’t be given something overwhelmingly tasty, so that at least they had a pleasant memory rather than one based on fear and pain. The poor things probably need therapy to get over the trauma. It does show, though that there is much more to caterpillars than we understand.

For many children caterpillars are their first introductions to the strange and wonderful natural world outside their back door. They are ideal in many ways – small, harmless (unless you pick a dermatitis-inducing one) and they are easy to rear. They are not so easy, however, to take right through to the butterfly stage. Plus, I remember being filled with horror when a caterpillar that I was looking after literally exploded into a mass of parasitic wasp larvae. What lessons they can teach us about the short, brutal lives of many creatures, and the moments of soaring beauty that pepper existence.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Knotgrass moth) – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=387198

Photo Two (Caterpillar head) – http://www.monarchwatch.org/grafx/biol/cathead.gif

Dear Readers, I am off to Austria at what is officially known as ‘stupid o’clock’ tomorrow, so here is my Saturday blog on Friday night. Wednesday Weeds will continue as normal for the next few weeks, but my Saturday blogs may have a Tyrolean feeling…..

Dear Readers, going to  Canada for two and a half weeks in April is not ideal from a gardener’s point of view. When I came back, the garden had turned into a jungle, the pond had become a bog, and I have been fighting to get things roughly back under control every since. And now we’re off to Austria for another two weeks, and there’s some rainy weather forecast. I shall have to hone the machete for our return.

It’s not just that everything has grown, either. Growing is fine. What if the bramble at the back of the garden is now dangling over, heavy with blackberries? What if the hedge, trimmed only last year, is now too high for me to reach and I have to send my husband out with a step-ladder? What if, in spite of the sterling work of the man who comes to look after the cat, the pond is a more-or-less complete carpet of duckweed? These are all things that can be remedied with a bit of sweat and a pair of secateurs or a net.

No, what worries me are the uninvited guests.

Take a look at my great willowherb. I have allowed a fine stand of it to grow next to the pond, because the bees love it, and its bright pink flowers are cheerful. However, I doubt that we will get many flowers at all this year, because a tiny seamstress has been at work. The leaves of almost every shoot have been stitched lovingly together, turning each bud into a fat purse.

The ‘purses’ are so well sewn up that it’s actually quite difficult to open them, and when I do, it’s clear that there’s somebody at home.

So, this little chap is a caterpillar. There is a vast group of tiny moths ( called micro-moths) who go about their business largely unnoticed. Some of them are so small that they can make their homes between the layers of a single leaf – you can often see their trails wandering about in plants like sow-thistle. Horse chestnuts in the UK have their own delightful leaf miners, which are turning the leaves brown even as I speak.

Slightly larger micromoth caterpillars make their homes by stitching leaves together, burrowing into stems and buds or eating their way into roots. They can be polyphagous (which means they eat lots of plants) or much more picky. Some live only on birches, some on roses, and some only on willowherbs. My gut feeling is that the culprit in my garden is Mompha epilobiella, a rather drab moth which specialises in  the Epilobium (willowherb) family.

When I say ‘drab’, however, it’s more a reflection on me than the moth. Here is the same species, spread-eagled as a specimen (poor thing). The wings are edged with long ‘hairs’ called cilia – these interlink in flight to give a bigger surface area for lift, and make the moth appear to be trailing clouds of glory. How intricate these tiny creatures are. I think that calling any living thing ‘drab’ indicates a failure of attention on my part.

The caterpillars are protected while they are at their smallest and juiciest in their bivouac of leaves. Other members of the Mompha family also like willowherbs, but will mine the leaves rather than stitching them together, or live in the stem, so there is no direct competition. I do wonder why the blue tits haven’t worked out what’s going on, as they are highly intelligent little birds, but maybe it’s too much effort when there are other exposed caterpillars about. The caterpillars are also protected from the various wasps who would love to feed them to their offspring. What a successful strategy for such a small, otherwise defenceless creature.

However, when the caterpillars pupate and drop to the soil, they are at their most vulnerable to attack from the wasps who couldn’t penetrate their leafy sanctuary. Those that survive will overwinter as adult moths, ready to launch into another campaign as soon as the weather warms up. However I fear that they will have to search elsewhere: I was planning to pull up the willowherb this year because I can no longer see the pond from the house, and plant something a bit more low-growing. There is no shortage of willowherb around here, so I feel only slightly guilty. I had hoped for elephant hawk moths, but when you plant a wildlife garden you really do have to be ready for whatever turns up.

In North America, great willowherb is a noxious weed, and there has been some excitement at the arrival of Mompha epilobiella. It’s hoped that the moth will keep the willowherb under control (and I suppose that the arrival of a natural predator, even an alien one, might be a cause for rejoicing). However, the local parasitic wasps have already discovered that the pupae make a delightful home for their larvae, illustrating how the arrival of non-native species can cause a whole series of unexpected effects.

When we tend a garden, what we are really doing is facilitating a whole host of living things, providing opportunities for them to thrive. And boy, do they take advantage of what we do. We slightly disrupt or add to one part of the complex web of relationships, and the next thing we know we’re inundated. It will be interesting to see what happens as the summer moves on – will the willowherb bounce back, or will it languish? Will I see lots of new tiny parasitic wasps? And when I clear the willowherb area, what will come into the garden to feast on whatever I plant next? Life is certainly full of surprises.

Photo Credits

Photo One (Live moth) – By Donald Hobern (Flickr: Mompha epilobiella) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Two (Specimen) – By Michael Kurz (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 at (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Photo Three (drawing of caterpillar) – Av Stainton – http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/25081, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16901734

 

Dear Readers, some people have mentioned that they have a degree of cognitive dissonance on realising that Bugwoman writes so little about invertebrates, and I can see what they mean. I can only recall one post on true bugs (the one that I did ages ago about Cuckoospit and froghoppers).Other small creatures, such as bees and woodlice and butterflies and slugs, make occasional appearances, but I am not really living up to my name. So when this magnificent house spider (Tegenaria gigantea) appeared on the glass medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom, I decided that she had to feature in a post.

I have no idea what she is up to. As you can see, she has built a web right across the opening  between the two glass doors. How she even managed it amazes me: she was slipping and sliding as soon as she stepped off of the silk. Normally, a house spider makes a sheet behind some furniture, or, in the case of my parents, inside their Tiffany uplighter, and then sits underneath with a foot poised on the web, waiting for the slightest vibration of some unfortunate ant or beetle. The web is not sticky, so the spider relies on speed to capture its prey, subdue it with a venomous bite and truss it up for later. My spider was therefore most unfortunate in her choice of site. I would like to say that the pristine state of the upstairs bathroom made it her only option, but in fact there were dozens of spots where she could have prepared her trap and not been noticed for years.

Sadly, I had to move her on: for one thing, my husband needed to get his shaving soap out of the cabinet. I was amazed at how strong the spider silk is, giving a palpable resistance as I separated the doors. And the spider was undaunted as well, hanging on and caressing the glass with one hopeful leg.

She looks absolutely enormous in these pictures, I realise, but at full stretch she was only about the length of my index finger. I know that, for some of you, that will be quite big enough. But there was a kind of elegance about her, svelt creature that she was. I suspect that the way that house spiders move is a major cause of fear: they have a kind of silent, inexorable, mechanical advance that invites a shudder if you are that way inclined. Of course, it’s the male house spiders advancing across the carpet in search of mates in autumn that cause most trouble. I well remember my grandmother dropping a hot water bottle on one when I was a child, surely the most unusual demise of any spider. As house spiders hold the speed record for true spiders (1.83 mph) she must have had most excellent hot water bottle depositing skills.

For anyone interested in the various creatures that share our homes, I can heartily recommend Richard Jones’s wonderful book ‘House Guests and House Pests – A Natural History of Animals in the Home’. He points out that house spiders were cave and forest dwellers long before there were houses, and that their predatory instincts are just as beneficial in maintaining the ecological balance in our homes as they are in ‘the wild’. If we made sanctuaries for spiders deliberately, who knows how the ant/fly problem might be ameliorated? I could create little houses that fitted into the spaces by the skirting board – Twentieth Century Modern ones would have tiny concrete cantilevered overhangs, and the Victorian ones could have bay windows and stained glass. I can just imagine how happy the house spiders would be as they moved in.  I’m sure that there’s a whole new business opportunity here, but sadly not for me, as no one in my family is as tolerant of our eight-legged friends as I am. In the end, I picked up this fine lady in my hand, and deposited her gently out of the window, where I watched her run under the eaves to set up another, hopefully more sensible, web. And at last my husband can get back to shaving. That stubbly look is so unflattering in anyone who isn’t George Clooney.

And for those of you with a few minutes to spare, can I recommend this story by David Sedaris, about his encounter with a house spider? It made me laugh until I cried.