Spider

As I have mentioned before, we have two resident spiders. One lives in a hole in the back-door frame, (I guess the previous owners of the house had a cable running outside through the hole). You can see the hole on the right, just above the bolt.


In the evening, the spider sits with its front few legs sticking out of the whole, waiting, I assume, for prey to wander by. When I lock the door, the vibrations send the spider disappearing back into the hole. I must confess to sometimes jiggling the door just to watch the spider's vanishing act!

So I was a little sad to find what I at first imagined to be its corpse on the floor by the door. Always one to spot an opportunity to engage the children in a educational moment, I fetched some tweezers and a match box so they could look closely at the body. I then discovered that the spider had no middle! In fact, it was not a spider at all, just its skin! What I had taken to be the husk of a sunflower seed from the bird food caught up in the silk, was, in fact, the back of the spider, a sort of lid!

I was very impressed by my find. I love the idea of the spider extricating itself, one leg at a time and leaving this perfect replica behind. I wonder too, how I can have gone through so many years of life, presumably in houses full of spiders, and never seen one of these before.