There’s a giant Argiope aurantia that’s taken up residence in the front garden, and she is doing her part cleaning up the last of the dying butterflies. Common names for this common spider are “black and yellow garden spider,” “yellow garden orb weaver,” and most interestingly to me, the “writing spider.”

According to this page from the University of Michigan, the purpose of the thicker, white, zig-zag portion of the web, called stabilimenta, is controversial:

At least 78 species of spiders add these structures to their webs, originally named “stabilimenta” because they were thought to provide structural stability. One study of Argiope spiders supports the idea that these bright white structures attract flying insects (Tso 1998). Contrary to this “prey attraction hypothesis,” hungry spiders build fewer or smaller stabilimenta, and webs with stabilimenta capture fewer prey (Blackledge 1998, Blackledge and Wenzel 1999). A competing hypothesis is that the highly visible threads prevent birds from flying through and destroying the webs.

I like that last theory the best.

When I was a kid and we found these spiders around the house, my dad used to catch bugs and toss them into the webs to feed these wild and temporary pets. It was country entertainment to watch the the spider jolt as something hit her snare, and then quick as an arrow she flew to the bug and wrapped it end over end in silk. Sometimes the bugs were too large to catch in the web, and they’d tear big gashes in the delicate structures that were always, magically, repaired by morning. Some bugs would feed the spider for days, until we’d come outside and the desiccated carcass of the unfortunate grasshopper or whatever would have been cut out of the web and left to drop on the deck. And then it was time for us to go hunting again.