Spiders Unmasked
A writer explores Maine’s coast in pursuit of eight-legged marvels.
By Frank Graham Jr./Photography by Piotr Naskrecki

The saltmarsh flanks a tidal creek that meanders in a deep trench toward the sea. Later in summer the marsh will vibrate with the rich yellow blossoms of seaside goldenrod and the darting flight of dragonflies. But now, on a cloudy morning in July, this expanse of grasses and rushes seems as lifeless as the lusterless sky overhead. Its secret isn’t out yet.

“What we’re looking for is all around us,” I assure my companions in the marsh, which lies close to my home in eastern Maine. On earlier visits, I had discovered hundreds of jumping spiders taking advantage of a curious natural phenomenon to build a hitherto-undescribed leafy metropolis that harbors thousands of their eggs or young. “Watch for dead leaves. They’re curly and stuck on rushes.”

The tufted, spikelike stems of rushes are common in wet places. Here they grow in abundance high on the marsh, most of them sporting dead birch leaves impaled on their stems. Our little group—taking part in a weeklong seminar on the biology of spiders at the Humboldt Wildlife Research Institute in nearby Steuben—huddles over the rushes for a closer look. I had suggested visiting the marsh on our first field trip.

“I’ve found jumping spiders occupying leaves from birches or maples in other marshes in the area, too,” I explain. “You can tell at a glance by the strip of white silk holding the leaves folded over and closed.”

We slide several leaves up over the pointed rush stems, pry them open, and invariably find an adult jumping spider nestled among the sticky silk. Occasionally a spider springs to safety, disappearing in the marsh debris; more often, it hunkers down among the scores of eggs or almost microscopic offspring packed into the silken retreat.

The marsh holds other astonishing sights on a Lilliputian scale. We find marsh grasses doubly twisted and folded, origami-wise, silk-lined nesting chambers that female sac spiders fashion to shelter themselves and their spiderlings. Amazing, yes—yet dazzling feats of nest construction are common in the animal kingdom. (Think of an oriole weaving its hanging nest.) But the jumping spiders’ manipulation of leaves, rushes, and silk seems uncanny. We conjure visions of myriad spiders hopping about, each selecting her dark-hued rush, climbing the stem lugging a leaf much larger than herself, then jamming it down over the stem’s sharp tip and sliding it into place. Fodder for “Loony Toons”? But there has to be a plausible answer to how this mass nursery annually comes into existence. That was still in the future.

Twenty years ago, I encountered, close-up, an order of animals whose reputation already fascinated me, though we hadn’t yet been formally introduced. They compose an outcast race, the age-old object of human innuendo and reprehension. Yet in their company I set out on an adventure that has enlightened and entertained me, brought me a group of amiable friends who share my interest, and given me a tangible basis to study the history of life on our unique planet. That day in the marsh, having observed similar spider behavior with Dan Jennings, a founding member of the American Arachnological Society and my mentor in “spidering,” I was simply carrying on my adventure.

Perhaps because of a misspent youth, one of my favorite words is opsimath. Definition: a person who begins to learn late in life. There was little in my background to suggest I might one day not only learn something about insects and spiders but also contribute to scientific papers concerning them. I liked animals, as most kids do, and enjoyed being in the outdoors. But for me the fields and woods were essentially bland countenances, attractive in their expanse and sense of mystery but lacking in distinguishing detail. I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. Neither high school nor college enlightened me much on the nature of nature: A biology teacher who might have planted a spark was bored with the subject and, at any rate, couldn’t have distinguished a robin from a blue jay.

College and a series of jobs that led me into journalism occupied me at first. Then, through friends, I discovered that watching birds and putting names to them could be more exciting even than the nitty-gritty of “inside baseball.” What brought depth to my new pleasure was an appreciation of place—the association of each bird with a landscape in which it had first appeared most vividly to me. A resonance took hold in my mind between a prothonotary warbler and the trail along a river in Virginia, between a tropical swamp and the scarlet ibises I had first seen there in a blaze of color. And, slowly, a curiosity arose about the leaves and blossoms, and the minikin animal life fluttering or scurrying in the foliage, making up the essence of those landscapes around me.

Reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the early 1960s focused me on insects as vital members of the habitats I scoured for birds. As a journalist, writing about environmental problems, I became a field editor at Audubon in 1968. A big step forward was to beef up my library in botany and entomology, especially with books containing comprehensive keys to identification. I made some headway, growing familiar with most insect orders and, before I backslid a little, was able to sort out families and even identify the commoner individuals to species.

In one sense, my location was a handicap. Living in the boonies, I had little contact with scientific institutions where I could do the necessary lab work in, say, insect anatomy. But in the late 1980s I made a breakthrough. An independent biological research station, eventually to be called the Humboldt Field Research Institute, opened near my home in Maine, and I began taking summer courses there, especially in entomology. I was picking up needed background in laboratory and field collecting techniques.

About the same time, my wife, Ada, joined National Audubon’s education division, developing and writing the children’s publication Audubon Adventures. We occasionally put on nature programs for schools and, at one such session near Bangor in the late ’80s, mentioned that we would soon be working on an Adventures issue about spiders. The school librarian approached us afterward.

“If you’re looking at spiders, you ought to talk to my father,” she said. “He’s a research entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service. He knows more about spiders than anyone else in Maine.”

When I visited Daniel T. Jennings in his office nearby, he was genuinely excited to meet someone else interested in spiders. Out came vials of specimens, and in a moment I was staring into the face of a jumping spider, preserved perhaps years earlier in alcohol but seeming to return my gaze through eyes that looked as huge as binoculars. As my new friend spoke about the diversity and life styles of his favorite subject, the most abundant and significant terrestrial predator on our planet, I was quickly pulled into the world of spiders.

Jennings was compiling a checklist of the spiders of Maine. His quest was restricted at the time because, working for the Forest Service on insect problems in the north woods, he had little opportunity to survey habitats along the coast where I lived. He asked me to help collect specimens for him. That meant acquiring field equipment, which included a heavy-duty net for sweeping spiders out of shrubs, a beating sheet into which to whack them out of trees with a stick, and an aspirator (called a “pooter” by collectors) for sucking them through a long plastic tube from walls or crevices. Constructing a home lab was a more costly step: I bought a good stereoscopic zoom microscope for $2,200 and, since the best ’scope is inadequate unless a specimen is well illuminated, I paid $600 for a two-pronged fiber-optic light source.

Well, what are these animals that caught and held me? Seen under a microscope, spiders are extraordinary beings. They aren’t insects, and zooming in on them through my 15x lenses (with up to about 60 total magnification) I can see why. Resemblances exist, including jointed legs that identify each as members of the huge animal phylum arthropoda (arthro = joint; pod = leg.) But three distinct sections mark the body of a mature insect: a head bearing eyes, mouthparts, and antennae; a thorax with six legs and one or two pairs of wings; and an abdomen housing most of its organs. The bodies of spiders are composed of two parts: a cephalothorax, combining the head and thorax, lacking wings or antennae but bearing eight legs, two fangs, and from two to eight eyes (occasionally none); and an abdomen that carries various organs, including silk glands and the spinnerets.

I don’t want to get into the “Mother Goose” approach to natural history—“good animals” and “bad animals.” But I can’t help pointing to the zillions of insects (mosquitoes, black flies, cotton boll weevils, Mediterranean fruit flies, etc.) that among humans are forever in ill repute. Spiders, on the other hand, aren’t pests. They don’t eat fruits, veggies, or anything else we want to keep for our tables. They don’t transmit diseases to people or other animals. All spiders are predators, yet despite the horror stories, they are chiefly programmed to bite other arthropods, not us. Of the 42,000 spider species worldwide, none attacks humans unless provoked or startled by them, most have fangs too small to break the skin, and only about a hundred may cause serious problems if they do.

Spiders are mobile chemical factories. Except for those in one small family, they produce venom injected into their prey through small openings in the fangs. All spiders make silk that is among the toughest of natural substances. (Scientists are trying to synthesize this silk for making bulletproof vests and other durable fabrics.) Spiders also concoct powerful digestive juices for use in feeding and pheromones that are effective attractants of the opposite sex.

So equipped, a spider is an infinitely fascinating subject for behavioral scientists. For instance, as a spider isn’t able to swallow solid food (or at least more than tiny bits and pieces), it begins digestion outside its body. Having bitten its prey, the spider vomits fluids from its intestinal tract into the wound, breaking down organs and sucking them out until the victim is only a hollow shell or a mass of crunchy debris. The quality and uses of silk, the sensory equipment, and other aspects of spider biology are also grist for the researchers’ work.

I was soon making small contributions to the study of spiders, which even 20 years ago was still in comparative infancy. In 1991, while picking spiders from sheet webs in shrubs near my home, I discovered a long-legged, slender-bodied specimen I couldn’t identify. I passed it on to my friend Dan Jennings, who admitted he was stumped and set it aside for a later look. Several years went by and then I found its twin in a seedling spruce. This time, Dan redoubled his efforts. He finally spotted his quarry in a set of books on the spiders of Great Britain and Ireland. Correspondence with European experts confirmed that “my spider” is a common sheet-web weaver of Europe and northern Asia named Linyphia triangularis.

When did “Linytri,” as we abbreviated its name, arrive in this country? Jennings, a Welsh-born entomologist named Kefyn Catley, and I coauthored a paper on the find in 2002 for the Journal of Arachnology. We speculated that its arrival must have been fairly recent. The spider is aggressive, quick to drive out and replace other small, web-building species wherever it lives. Since the late 1890s, however, a number of expert collectors have covered New England and Canada’s Maritime Provinces but the species was unknown in North America until I found it. As far as I know, it still hasn’t been found outside of Maine.

What’s the big deal about such a discovery? Well, for one thing it’s a neat creature. Also, biologists know that exotic plants or animals may have an effect, malignant or benign, on local ecosystems. “Linytri” tends to crowd out others in its European range and, as its population grows, it may create problems for native spiders here. Acadia National Park supported a study of the species within its boundaries after we established its presence, but with no substantial evidence of anything as yet.

Almost everywhere I look now in my area during late summer—in clumps of young spruce trees, on the edges of meadows, even in ornamental gardens, I find specimens of this exotic species. From the middle of July until early October, I monitor their webs (glistening with moisture on foggy mornings) in a 15-foot stretch of barberry shrubs bordering our home. Despite periods of high wind and heavy rain, and the occasional visitation of predatory spider wasps, the number of webs usually climbs to about a dozen and holds steady till the first frosts.

Meanwhile, Jennings and I keep busy monitoring the spiders within the boundaries of Milbridge (human population: 1,300), where I live. We have ransacked local fields, shorelines, marshes, and roadsides, identifying 304 species. Of that total, 179 species are web spinners and 123 active hunters that never spin webs. In 2007 the U.S. Forest Service published our findings as what’s called a general technical report, “Spiders (Arachnida, Araneae) of Milbridge, Washington County, Maine.” (Go to www.nrs.fs.fed.us and click on “publications.”) We look on our report as a model for current nationwide inventories of invertebrates and other small animals often overlooked on the local level.

Last summer I attended my fourth spider workshop at the Humboldt Field Research Institute (familiarly known as Eagle Hill) in Steuben, Maine. Dan Jennings had led, or been a co-leader, during three previous sessions there. Workshop members mostly included scientists in other disciplines and amateur naturalists hoping to broaden their scope. Even a couple of environmental educators signed up, determined to overcome their lifetime fear of spiders. (They did, to some extent.)

We had a new instructor for this workshop—Matthias Foellmer, a German-born specialist on spiders and insects at New York’s Adelphi University, where he is an assistant professor in biology. As the “day boy” and guide to good spidering sites in the local area, I helped Foellmer set up field trips. Participants in this workshop also included Miriam Shulman, who became so enamored of spiders on a nature trip in Hawaii some years ago that she now raises them in her kitchen in Los Angeles and puts on programs about them in the city’s schools. Here, with Foellmer, I had an opportunity to expand my horizons in arachnology.

During the weeklong session, Foellmer mixed lab lectures and advice on identifying individual spiders with trips to various habitats in the area. I led our group to a dam at the end of a shallow lake where we found Dolomedes, the huge “fishing spiders” that prey on aquatic insects (and sometimes small fish). I took everybody to my home to see “Linytri,” my European find, in its barberry shrub. And, arousing the most interest of all, I showed off the dozens of jumping spiders hidden away in their ready-made retreats along the salt marsh creek.

After our visit, I brought several of the rushes with their impaled birch leaves back to Eagle Hill. The institute usually hosts several workshops at a time, and one of the concurrent seminars that week was devoted to the study of sedges, rushes, and grasses. Its instructor, Andrew L. Hipp of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, identified the rushes as Juncus arcticus and suggested an explanation for the existence of this spider congregation: In autumn, the leaves fall along the marsh’s edge and lie, sodden but intact, under winter’s rain and snow. Spring arrives, the marsh stirs, and the sharp-tipped rushes sprout, penetrating the still-wet leaves and lifting them into the air as they grow. Thus the leaves remain above ground like tiny platforms, available and still flexible for wandering spiders to fashion into safe retreats.

Now, at whatever season I drive across the narrow bridge near the head of the salt marsh, I’m aware of a living mechanism below. Wind and rain, a regenerative urge in the soil, and a force for renewal in remarkable little animals almost 400 millions years in the making, are unconsciously preparing another of my thrilling tomorrows.

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