Bio-Nerds, part 2

We have some great spiders around our house, so we decided it's time to introduce you to them. (We have some other arthropods, too, but the spiders are the coolest, and also the most permanent, so they get this blog entry.)

Big Mama
Big Mama is grey house spider and a very busy mum! She seems very patient, and had no problems with me taking pics of her and her kids. Good thing she has so many eyes to keep track of all those little ones!



Priscilla
Yes, as in "...Queen of the Desert," because she's quite showy. Priscilla is a St.Andrews Cross spider. She lives outside our kitchen window, so we see her all the time. She changes the number & thickness of the zig-zags in her web, so it's fun to check out her design scheme each morning. No kids for her, yet. There are some other St.Andrews Cross spiders in the neighborhood, but they're all much bigger (but not as pretty), so we think Priscilla is just young.



Sheila
Sheila is a common black house spider, and you actually met her on the last Bio-Nerds entry. She's still around, getting bigger, and now she's started a family. "Sheila" is defined by the Aussie slang dictionary as "a common term for an Australia female, usually single and probably good looking." Since we actually have a few black house spiders in our back porch, we decided to use a general Aussie name for all of them, but Sheila #1 is still our favourite. She's the only one we feed. The big black dot in front of her is a fly we threw in the web; the little black dots are her kids.



Powerful females of the Fanson household