spider, feather, frog: 3 little notes on gender (and wonder) in nature

ALONG came a spider the other afternoon, specifically an impressive female garden orb weaver, Argiope aurantia—an extremely widespread species, from southern Canada down to Costa Rica and most of the lower 48 between.

And I say female with a degree of confidence, because of her size (a female of this species can be up to three times a male’s) and also because of the big web she had made.

See that zig-zag stuff in her web? It’s called stabilimenta (word of the day; singular is stabilimentum) and if you get a chance to see the locomotion she gets going to make it, it’s very cool. Whether the zig-zags simply reinforce the web or also help in other ways, such as with prey attraction or advertising to birds not to fly into webs, has been the subject of various research efforts.

More crazy details: I read that the spider eats the web and makes a new one each night. And one reader told me, after I published this story, that Argiope is also called the writing spider.

WHAT TOM left behind (left to right, above): one tail feather and one wing feather from an adult male turkey. How do I know where these feathers fitted onto their former owner’s plumage, and that the bird who lost them was a male and an adult? The United States Fish & Wildlife Service Feather Atlas is a cool tool for such IDs. Visit it, and be prepared to get lost in geeky exploration.

One tech note: The search box up top left at the Feather Atlas sometimes doesn’t work for me, so I often start here, on the search page—reachable from the “search scans” navigation