Some are bigger than others.

Tarantulas are on the move here in the Big Bend country. I regularly see them crawling across the highway the past couple of weeks.

On the move. Everything is bigger in Texas. I suppose you get used to them at some point, but I’ve never seen one in the wild. My son is on a field trip studying sedimentary rock formations in New Mexico and Texas and sent us that picture. The other picture is one I took of a spider on a pant leg of my blue jeans.

Spiders. Yuck.


As it goes, though, I was thinking about spiders over the weekend. One has woven a "yuge" and pretty web across part of my porch. He's a big fella (not as big as that tarantula, thankfully), and the web is about 2-3 feet across. I'm thinking either he's eating well (he's a big fella), or he's starving (there's nothing else caught in the web).

But the question came to mind, "for how long do I put up with this spider web on my porch?" I don't really like it where it is, but so far it's not hurting anything. The answer came clear when I had to go change the flag on the porch -- at that point, that web -- spider and all -- had to go!

"Ya ain't gotta go home, but ya can't stay here!"

Here in Georgia it seems to be Joro spider season once again.
An invasive species from an "East Asian" country, you know what that means, China, that makes large webs.
Fortunately, generally harmless to humans, just annoying to be on a casual walk and get a face full of web with a larger size spider in the middle.
They don't seen to have made a real dent in the Mosquito population either.

This thread makes me think of this Far Side Cartoon:

Tarantulas are basically harmless to humans. And they don’t build webs where you can walk into one and get it all over your face. I would say they’re my favorite kind of spider.

I am so fed up with these damn Joro spiders, webs everywhere.

We have tarantulas of course - I see them out and about in my yard in the evenings quite frequently.

We also have brown recluse and black widows here by the hundreds. I spray for them every month.

The garden spiders that were common in Missouri when I was a kid made large webs suspended between tree limbs and the ground.

They made one of the panels opaque – easily seen so humans and other animals wouldn’t blunder in to the web. If I approached one the spider would do a trampoline act as though it was threatening to launch itself at me. Scary!