Golden Orb Weaver Spiders
At first glance, it seems like someone was being clumsy when they named a silver spider the Golden Orb Weaver. But that bit about the gold wasn’t refering to the spider. It was refering to the orb.
PHOTO ABOVE: A male Nephila ornata in the top of this image is dwarfed by the female. Notice that the male is offered a small amount of protection by being on the opposite side of the web
I don’t expect photography journals to beat a path to my door to purchase the rights to the picture at left. It’s blurred and well, pretty awful. But it does show how yellow these golden orb webs can be with this type of spider, which explains their name. That’s not to say they all make a web like this. Some of them look pretty much like every other spider web. To see if you’ve found one with good colour, it helps to look at it in good sunlight, and ideally view it edge-on like in this photo. The colour can sometimes be remarkable.
A female Nephila ornata stands over her egg sac. The golden colour of the silk is most easily seen in this photo
Nephila ornata will often form clusters of webs with others of the same species
With some types of spiders there’s a difference in size between the males and females. Nephila ornata has taken this idea almost to the point of a joke. The picture at the top of this page shows you what I mean. That big thing filling the picture is the female. The male is at the top of the photo and he’s so small you’d almost think those two spiders were from different species.
Often around the end of summer or autumn, these spiders will often form themselves and their webs into large clusters, usually high up but sometimes at our face-level. If you do walk into one of their webs you’ll be pleased to know that these are not considered to be dangerous to people.
A mature female Golden Orb Weaver is a big spider. These spiders also have very strong silk. They hang around in the centres of their webs and you’ll often see the dried-up husks of prey hanging in neat rows like a bunch of trophies. You can see that as a row of dots in the photo at right. As you’d expect from a Golden Orb Weaver, their egg sacs are a beautiful golden yellow.
Other Golden Orb Weavers
There are other spiders in this group of Nephila spiders and it’s pretty safe to call them Golden Orb Weavers.
In northern Australia some of them can get pretty big, often reaching the size of a person’s hand. Living throughout the tropical north of Australia, these handsome critters make very big — and strong — orb webs. Their web is so strong that some indigenous people have found some clever uses for them. For example, they might swing a stick through their webs, tangling up the spiders and their webs, and use those spidery tangles to lure and trap fish.
These spiders eat insects that get caught in the web, but they have a reputation for eating birds too. With a web so big (over a metre across) and strong it’s not surprising that it could happen. These spiders have been seen feeding on the birds, but I stress that it is not their usual diet.
