There’s a spider that builds a web outside my front door every night. As this is a bother to anyone who wants to come into the house at night (the web’s in such a position that it’s difficult to avoid hitting your head on it unless you remember that it’s there), I’d like to find some way to prevent this (short of killing the spider, which is fairly large, and I figure s/he’ll be dead in a few weeks once the cold weather comes)…but anyway, I’m wondering if I destroy this spider’s web every night, will it eventually learn that it’s chosen to make its web in an inhospitable place, and decide to make its home somewhere else? Or should I learn to live with it (or just pick up the damn thing and move it to the other side of my yard)?
You say this spider is fairly large. How fairly large are we talking, here?
I can understand not killing it if it’s huge.
Perhaps just moving it would be best.
One anecdote - Ariadne, the spider carried aboard Skylab in the early '70s was unable to spin a web for the first few days in zero-G, but eventually adapted to the conditions and by the end of the mission was spinning perfect webs (and I mean perfect, because they weren’t distorted by gravity). So, um… maybe.
jjimm, that they brought a spider into space intrigues me. Simple Google searches for keywords like Ariadne, spider, and skylab don’t give me any interesting links, do you know where I could find out more?
Never mind, a search for “skylab spider” did the trick. Her name was Arabella.
Do you have a porch light? The spider is probably trying to take advantage of the insects that are attracted to the light at night.
Their survival instincts are fairly strong so I would think you would to move it somewhere relatively far away (from the spider’s perspective) to convince it to leave your doorway.
BTW, as a former animal trainer I can tell you that “anything that eats can be trained, except for my cat”. Assuming you have the time and patience to train it!
I’m not so sure. I recall reading about a certain type of wasp (in Douglas Hoffstader’s Godel, Escher, Bach,) which was fairly demonstrated to be “running a program” rather than showing situation-based learning.
The example he gave, if I recall correctly, involved placing a small obstruction in front of a newly-made hole in which it was about to drag its prey prior to laying its eggs in it and forgetting about it.
When faced with the obstacle, the wasp would drag it a short way off and then return to the hole. If scientific curiousity, (or sheer bloody-mindedness) has led the researcher to put another pebble in the way, it will again drag it a short way off and then return to the hole. If every time it returns to the hole, it finds another pebble there, it will repeat this behaviour until it dies. At no point will it make the creative abduction required to try making another hole in a luckier location.
I wonder why I thought her name was Ariadne?
It would have been an appropriate name, n’est-ce pas? magic thread and all that.
It’s probably about 2" with legs extended. Not huge, but larger than your common house spider. I wasn’t reluctant to kill it because of the “ick factor”; I just prefer not to kill spiders, since they’re doing me a favor by getting rid of some more annoying animals (mosquitoes, gnats, etc). I was actually more interested in the answer to the question “can spiders learn”, rather than finding a solution to this relatively trivial problem. The reason I was curious is that I love watching this thing spin its web (which it does every night, and then it [the spider] disappears every morning until the next evening); it seems to be a very complicated instinct which must have taken an amazing amount of time to evolve. So I was wondering if there was room in that tiny little brain of theirs to actually learn anything, or is it pure ROM :)?.
There is no porch light to attract insects (well, there is one, but we very rarely use it); the closest light that’s regularly on is a street lamp probably 50 feet away. I’m wondering if the spider likes this spot because of the ease of web construction; we have an aluminum awning over the porch supported by wrought iron vertical posts; it builds its web in the corner formed by a post and the awning.
It’s possible that there’s some learning involved with the spiders around here. It may be nothing more than my paying attention to it, but it seems that late summer (August/September) is the time when spiders are most active with web building. That the time coincides with hunting season may be part of it, but the number of webs I will encounter outside goes way up in this season. I assume it’s to be able to get a prey trapped, lay eggs, all that.
Anyway, I have an awning over the back door and spiders like to start a web either on the awning and a nearby tree limb, or between limbs, so the web winds up being where we walk. I usually just break the web and avoid dealing with the spider. But it’s rare that a new web goes up in the same place. New webs appear, but elsewhere.
The most amusing web story I can remember has to do with this particularly industrious spider that had this monster web stretching between two trees that were at least 30’ apart. It had to get way up in one tree, swing over to the other somehow just to get the web started. After watching it (not constantly, but off and on) most of the day, I saw this enormous web. Had to have been at least 30’ across and maybe 10’ tall and out in the middle of the yard. A squirrel managed to break it somehow and the spider started all over again in the same spot. Took another day to build the new one.
I just know that if I’m thinking of being in the woods (hunting, hiking, whatever) I take along a long stick to swing in front of me to get rid of webs. They’re plentiful these days. But they’ll be gone in another few weeks.
I have heard rumors of Tarantulas learning to recognize their owners. Don’t know if it is true though, and it is too early to research for me.
Don’t take this too seriously, but I’ve heard rumours that young spiders build their webs with the centerpoint right in the geographic middle of the web. But older spiders learn that it’s easier to drop than it is to climb, so they make the centerpoint slightly above the geographic middle.
Put that on the ‘research pile’. Or not.