I came home to find this on my wall.
What on earth is happening? Are they busy making babies, or eating one another, or what?
It looks to me like what you have there is not two spiders, but a spider which has captured a long-legged crane fly. I only count 14 legs there, not 16 as you would expect if it were two spiders. It looks like the second animal is wrapped in silk. Can you see if it has wings?
Looks like you’re right. I left the situation alone, and this morning the spider’s still busy wrapping the thing up!
As Colibri says, it looks like a crane fly, dinner for the spider. Somebody here mentioned http://www.whatsthatbug.com/index.html as a great resource; if you send the pic in they could tell you.
SPIDERS ARE CANNIBALS!! :smack:
Every Tuesday is Spider Day on the SDMB!!!
Crane Flies eat mosquitoes. Anything that eats a crane fly (or, in the vernacular: mosquito hawk, dumb bug, daddy longlegs, etc) is therefoe evil and must die. You did remember to murder the spider, didn’t you?
Sadly, they do not ( I’m all in favor of mosquito-eating critters myself ). The nickname “mosquito hawk” is a misnomer and probably stems from the views of people that think they look like giant mosquitos. But in truth they aren’t predatory at all - in fact perfectly harmless. Even towards mosquitos, more’s the pity.
- Tamerlane
When I was a kid in the Bronx we used to call Crane Flies “Jersey Mosquitos” in the belief that they were gargantuan skeeters bred in the Great Swamp of New Jersey.