Photos by Dr. Joe Culin. At this time of year, spiders seem to appear out of nowhere. We may find ourselves walking into their webs at night, and we often see spiders running across the ground, and sometimes on our floors. The reason for this seemingly sudden increase in spiders is that many of he species in our area spend the winter as eggs, or as adults that will lay eggs early in the spring. That means most of our spiders are small in the spring, and usually go unnoticed.
Spiders spend their summer eating a lot of insects and growing.
As a group, spiders probably consume more pest insects than any other group of predators. Besides simply being larger, several other factors contribute to their increased visibility. One is that adult spiders roam around in search of mates and places to lay their eggs, so they are more likely to be noticed than immature spiders. Two other factors contribute to the increased visibility of web-building spiders. One is that adult spiders build much larger webs than young spiders.