Mel Allen lives with her dad. They are used to seeing giant size wildlife.
There are things that take their breath away. One fine day Allen’s father was in the backyard hanging the clothes on the clothesline to dry when he spotted a silky and shiny string.
Allen was in the backyard when her dad called. There was a huge spider web between the trees.
The Spider web was so large that it looked like a wheel. It looked like the ones you find at Halloween stores.
Aleen asked her father to act as a scale for her photo because she wanted to show the hugeness of the spider web. The web was almost the same height as his, as he stood next to it.
“I was pretty impressed with the size of it, but also how near-perfect it was,” Allen shared. “But I was also slightly terrified thinking about how big the spider that made the web must be.”
Allen was curious to see the spider.
If the web is large, then the spider must also be large. She found the spider in her dad’s yard.
“I found the spider in question asleep on a curled-up leaf in one of the trees the web was hanging from,” Allen told. It was a female golden orb-weaver.
It’s also known as a banana spider or a giant wood. The spider hid from the morning sun.
The male spider is small. Its female is large with a body size of 1.5 inches.
It only took her a night to build a large web and she was able to catch insects.
The large-sized spider webs offer protection from their prey. “The golden orb-weaving spiders build large, semi-permanent orb webs,” the Australian Museum shares.
“The strong silk has a golden sheen. These spiders remain in their webs day and night and gain some protection from bird attack[s] by the presence of a ‘barrier network’ of threads on one or both sides of the orb web.”
The golden orb-weavers are not very fond of biting humans so they don’t cause any harm.
They cause their web to vibrate if they feel a threat. The spider does not bother anyone and Allen’s dad didn’t mind having it in his yard.
He’s happy to share the yard with it.
