I work a lot of evenings, and currently drive to work in my car. Being summer here at present, I leave well before dark, and return in the wee small hours. Every night as I’m putting the car back into the garage (la-de-da car hole), I have to negotiate the works of one spider, whom I will call Rufus. Rufus could be a girl spider for all I know, but living over a garage door is, I figure, a blokey kind of lifestyle. To see the handsome devil up closeish, click here, here, here, and here. He’s not quite as big as he look in the photos, maybe an inch and three quarters clear of his legs, at best.
I’m not a great admirer of creepy crawlies, but I figure if they’re outside the house, minding their own business, we can probably learn to get along. With Rufus, I’ve had to make some accommodations so that we can both continue to do our own thing. During the daytime, he curls up under the eaves, dead centre above and if front of the garage roller door. His camo is pretty sound, you wouldn’t spot him unless you knew what you were looking for. After dark, he gets busy and spins a more or less triangular web, about two feet to a side, with the bottom of the eave as the base. It ends up being vertical, half a yard in front of the roller door. He props in the middle to lower reaches, waiting for dinner. The way he does it, you can drive the car underneath without hitting the web itself. The problem is the several supporting lines he runs down to the ground, to anchor the whole show in place. You can’t drive around those, not where he puts them, smack in the middle of the car hole.
Rather than drive right through his handy work, possibly dislodging him onto the car (not where I want him living, thankyew), I’m gently removing his lower scaffolding with a broom before driving underneath. When I do this, he either remains in place and starts winding in any loose threads, or unfortunately starts lowering himself into the car zone, to make repairs. If the latter, I sabotage a bit more web up the top somewhere, until he gets clear of where I want to drive. One time he just wasn’t getting the idea, and he ended up on the ground. He must have managed to survive OK down there, because he was back up the next night. I’ve only seen him catch anything once, a beetle type thing, which I think he wrapped up for later. Overall, he’s a tidy bastard, and completely packs up his web before daybreak. Daytime car activity is therefore spider free.
I dunno what kind of spider he is. Examination of online resources hasn’t given me a match. If any Arachnologist Dopers would like to offer opinions as to Rufus’s ancestry, I’d be most grateful. He’s a resident of coastal NSW, a little south of Sydney. Being an Australian spider, it’d be a great disappointment if he was any less than extremely venomous and ill tempered. It’s a wonder he hasn’t ripped my arms off and levelled several city blocks in retribution for my web breaking. If the other spiders find out that he’s not an eight legged Chuck Norris, they might tease him.
I didn’t think Rufus was quite GQ material, so into MPSIMS he goes.
