{"id":2300,"date":"2007-10-10T03:45:47","date_gmt":"2007-10-10T09:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/gardenlog\/?p=2300"},"modified":"2016-12-02T01:24:19","modified_gmt":"2016-12-02T01:24:19","slug":"life-and-death-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/garden-critters\/life-and-death-struggle\/","title":{"rendered":"Life and Death Struggle [Updated]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dateline: October 9, 2007<\/h4>\n

I was distracted by violent movement from the web of a spiny-backed orb weaver. These little fellers have been very active this year and walking through the garden lately is like walking a spider obstacle course. Going over to investigate, I saw the spiny-backed orb weaver struggling with something much larger. At first I thought it was a red wasp. I went to get my camera which sees much better than I. As I crept in closely for a photo, the larger creature ran nimbly up one of the threads holding the web to the tree. I held still and it ran back down to finish off its dirty deed, for it had attacked the smaller spiny-backed orb weaver and rent its web in the struggle.<\/p>\n

Update: October 10, 2007<\/h4>\n

I sent some photos to Jerry Cates of Bugs in the News<\/a> and he identified the spider as an arabesque orb weaver, Neoscona arabesca<\/i>. As it turns out I completely misread what I had observed. The web belongs to the arabesque who builds it every night and dismantles it every morning when it is light. The small object is most likely not another spider but just a nasty bug that the spider is cleaning up for me.<\/p>\n

I confirmed his hypothesis by going out this morning to have another look. The web that had completely disappeared by mid-morning yesterday had been rebuilt. And there was the arabesque orb weaver curled up in the center. It is very camera shy and every time I tried to get close to it to get a photo in the low light of dawn, it would run up a thread to the tree above. I have to say that I wish the spinyback orb weavers would take a page out of their cousins book and dismantle their webs every morning!<\/p>\n

\"arabesque<\/p>\n

Isn’t it amazing to believe one’s own eyes and then discover that one is completely wrong. I have to learn to see with better eyes than this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"spider
A shy arabesque orb weaver.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2300"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5030,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2300\/revisions\/5030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zanthan.com\/gardens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}