inSects In The City: Episode One
08/07/2008
Meet Charlotte, a spider the size of a grain of rice--the fat sushi quality kind, not the long grain, wild kind...but I digress. She calls a corner of my bathroom home, which was pretty sweet real estate since the nearby window (like the rest in the apartment) sported large cracks, providing a plethora of winged prey commuting in from the alley just outside. A week later, however, the windows were replaced, leaving me feeling far more secure. But after a few mornings, I noticed the same old desiccated husk of a bug was still in Charlotte’s web from over two weeks ago. Then I felt guilty, thinking, she's going to starve; how can I let this happen?! Just then, a mosquito dared to land on my head, like manna from the heavens. I made like a V-8 commercial, smacked my skull and the bloodsucker fell to the floor. Picking it up gingerly, I dropped it in to Charlotte's web, quite excited, and waited...for big, fat nothing. The nerve! But then I realized: Oh wait, don't spiders favor live prey? So I softly blew on the web, attempting to create an illusion of struggling prey. Voila, Charlotte scampered over and was on that mosquito like Samantha Jones on a young stud after a few cosmopolitans. Here are some scenes of Charlotte, feasting her fangs out:
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Okay, so remember how I said the apartment was sealed up tighter than a Ziploc bag? Well, someone didn’t match up the yellow and blue stripes very well because on the kitchen counter I found a small centipede-like insect, which I promptly stunned and…well, you know what happened next. But allow me to show you, anyway:
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About a week ago, I started worrying more about my mental state than Charlotte’s dietary one. I was out at a nice Korean dinner, getting the check, and a fly landed nearby. With Karate Kid-like precision, I stunned it and wrapped it in a napkin to carry home. I paused to ask my dinner partner if this was weird. His longer pause spoke volumes. But I carried it back anyway, and boy was Charlotte happy. Not even requiring the usual trickery, she came over and dug in. Naturally, I have more pictures. I like to think of ours as a symbiotic relationship: I make one hapless fly offer, and she allows me a few cool photos. Seems a pretty fair trade to me… right..?
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It's a blog, about bugs--it's a BLUG!
Comments
I fed my garden spider
I had a beautiful spider in my garden with a fantastic web. My wife wanted me to get rid of her but she was so beautiful to kill. I loved to catch moths and put them on her web. She was like lightening, swooping down and encasing them in her silk.
Charlotte Homes
salutations!
great photos! strangely enough, i seem to have an abundance of gigantic American house spiders around the yard this year. i'm thinking it has a lot to do with new construction blocking air flow to the yard and thus increasing the numbers of mosquitos and flies. either that, or it's because i haven't mowed the yard lately. nonetheless, they're amazing and i, too, feed my favorite one ...she tends to prefer moths and sated mosquitos (fresh from my arms and ankles) rather than flies. i'll try again to get some clear, high resolution pics. to send you.
cheers!